Substitutional Doping for Aluminosilicate Mineral and Superior Water Splitting Performance

Nanoscale Research Letters

Aidong Tang¹  Tao Jiang²  Liangjie Fu²  Huaming Yang²  Yi Zhang²  Zhan Shu² 

[1] School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University;School of Minerals Processing and Bioengineering, Central South University;

关键词: Aluminosilicate mineral;    Halloysite nanotubes;    La doping;    Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution;    DFT calculations;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s11671-017-2192-8

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Abstract Substitutional doping is a strategy in which atomic impurities are optionally added to a host material to promote its properties, while the geometric and electronic structure evolution of natural nanoclay mineral upon substitutional metal doping is still ambiguous. This paper first designed an efficient lanthanum (La) doping strategy for nanotubular clay (halloysite nanotube, HNT) through the dynamic equilibrium of a substitutional atom in the presence of saturated AlCl3 solution, and systematic characterization of the samples was performed. Further density functional theory (DFT) calculations were carried out to reveal the geometric and electronic structure evolution upon metal doping, as well as to verify the atom-level effect of the La doping. The CdS loading and its corresponding water splitting performance could demonstrate the effect of La doping. CdS nanoparticles (11 wt.%) were uniformly deposited on the surface of La-doped halloysite nanotube (La-HNT) with the average size of 5 nm, and the notable photocatalytic hydrogen evolution rate of CdS/La-HNT reached up to 47.5 μmol/h. The results could provide a new strategy for metal ion doping and constructive insight into the substitutional doping mechanism.

【 授权许可】

Unknown