Modulation of ZnO Nanostructure for Efficient Photocatalytic Performance

Nanoscale Research Letters

Research

Shanzhi Qu¹  Junyong Kang¹  Xiaofang Ye¹  Jinshen Lan¹  Shuping Li¹  Hao Peng¹  Gengnan Ye¹  Bolin Sun¹  Yuchen Fei¹  Peng Long¹  Yilin He¹  Jing Wan¹  Shengli Huang¹ 

[1]Engineering Research Center of Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Materials and Devices, Ministry of Education, Fujian Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Materials and Applications, CI Center for OSED, Department of Physics, Jiujiang Research Institute, Xiamen University, 361005, Xiamen, China

关键词: ZnO;    Nanostructure;    Photocurrent response;    Photocatalysis;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s11671-022-03760-x

 received in 2022-10-07, accepted in 2022-11-28,  发布年份 2022

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Structure has been considered to play an important role in photocatalytic performance of the semiconductors, but the intrinsic factors were rarely revealed. Herein, ZnO nanomaterials in the structures of thin film, nanowire array and nanosheet array were synthesized, and their structural characteristics, optical properties, photocurrent response and photocatalytic efficiency were compared with each other for illustrating the issue. The photoluminescence intensity decreased in the order of nanosheets, thin film and nanowires for improved lifetime of the photoexcited charges. The absorption of the nanosheets and nanowires improved obviously in the visible range with a redshift of the absorption edge than that of the thin film. The nanowires possessed the highest response current of 82.65 μA at a response time of 2.0 ms in a sensitivity of 87.93 at the light frequency of 1 Hz, and gained the largest catalytic efficiency of 2.45 μg/cm2 h for the methylene blue degradation in UV light. Nevertheless, the improvement of catalytic efficiency of the nanosheets (up to 42.4%) was much larger than that of nanowires (5.7%) and thin film (2.6%) for the Au coating. The analysis revealed that the photocatalytic efficiency of the ZnO nanomaterials was modulated by the structure as it contained different surface area, roughness, defect and doping states, vacancies, polar and non-polar crystalline faces, which would provide structural design of semiconductor nanomaterials for the photoelectric and photocatalytic applications.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2022

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