The
nanostructured Au cocatalyst modification of BiVO4 photocatalyst,
as a prospective method, can significantly promote
its photocatalytic H2O2 production performance.
However, the contact between Au and BiVO4 causes a strong
built-in field, which impedes the photogenerated-electron transfer
and the accumulation of negative charge density for Au, which reduces
its catalytic activity of two-electron O2 reduction, thus
limiting the enhanced H2O2 production performance
of the Au/BiVO4 photocatalyst. To solve the above problems,
here, a Cu@Au core-shell nanostructured cocatalyst is designed to
selectively modify on the electron-enriched (010) facet of a single-crystal
BiVO4 microparticle by facile photodeposition and subsequently
galvanic displacement. In this case, ohmic contact between the Cu
nanoparticle and (010) facet of BiVO4 can effectively transfer
the photogenerated electrons to the Au cocatalyst and simultaneously
facilitate the catalytic activity improvement of two-electron O2 reduction for the Au cocatalyst due to its low negative charge
accumulation. As a result, the optimized BiVO4 photocatalyst
with Cu@Au core-shell nanostructured modification exhibits obviously
improved photocatalytic performance of H2O2 formation
(91.1 μmol L–1) compared with Au/BiVO4 (62.5 μmol L–1). The present strategy
of a bimetal cocatalyst with a core-shell nanostructure opens up an
insight to explore effective photocatalytic materials for the application
of H2O2 production.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.