Star-shaped ZnO/Ag hybrid nanostructures for enhanced photocatalysis and antibacterial activity

Research progress of photocatalytic sterilization over semiconductors

“…4 Moreover, some other nanomaterials, such as ZnO, CdS, CeO 2 and BiVO 4 etc., show excellent performance in photocatalytic sterilization. 2,[5][6][7][8][9] TiO 2 has always been considered as the most promising catalyst in the photocatalytic disinfection of bacteria; however, due to the wide band gap of anatase TiO 2 (3.2 vs. 3.0 eV of rutile), it is limited to UV light at wavelengths less than 385 nm, which accounts for less than 5% of solar energy. 10,11 Thus, it is indeed of great necessity to expand its adsorption region from UV light to the visible light region.…”

Au/ZnO Hybrid Nanostructures on Electrospun Polymeric Mats for Improved Photocatalytic Degradation of Organic Pollutants

“…Among the diverse types of nanocomposites developed so far following this approach [13,17,20], the ZnO-based mats is a promising system for the water remediation through the photocatalytic approach. In fact, ZnO is of great interest not only because it is environmental friendly, non-toxic, of low-cost, and abundant, but also because of its optoelectronic properties [9,[21][22][23][24]. In particular, the n-type ZnO is a direct wide band gap semiconductor (band gap energy, E g = 3.37 eV), characterized by a high exciton binding energy (60 meV), which allows efficient excitonic emission even at room temperature [25].…”

“…For this reason, the enhancement of the separated electron-hole lifetime is one of the factors on which the efforts are focused in order to improve the ZnO photocatalytic performance [26][27][28]. This aspect can be achieved through various methods, such as the modification of the morphology of the ZnO nanostructures [22,29], the incorporation of metallic [30,31] and non-metallic dopants [32] in their crystalline structure, and the preparation of hybridized structures with other materials [21,22,33,34].…”

“…Concerning the last method, the combination of ZnO NPs with noble metal NPs has been recently considered an effective route to enhance the local density of states at the metal-semiconductor interface, prolonging thus the electron-hole separation lifetime [21,33]. Specifically, the use of Au NPs to modify the ZnO surface has been proven to improve the photocatalytic performance of the semiconductor due to the surface plasmonic resonance effect (which allows the establishment of the Schottky barrier simplifying the charge carrier separation), the absorption in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the ROS generation [35,36].…”

Ca-hydroxyzincate: Synthesis and Enhanced Photocatalytic Activity for the Degradation of Methylene Blue Under UV-Light Irradiation

“…Advanced treatment technologies have been evaluated such as heterogeneous photocatalytic oxidation process [7][8][9] which is widely used to control aqueous organic pollutants and has been considered to be one of the most studied purification techniques to degrade low concentration of organic contaminants by converting them into environmentally friendly products.…”