A new TiO₂ nanorods/MoTe₂ quantum dots/Al₂O₃ composite photocatalyst for efficient photoelectrochemical water splitting under simulated sunlight

Abstract

The solar-to-hydrogen conversion using the photoelectrochemical (PEC) method is a practical approach to producing clean energy. However, it relies on the availability of photocatalyst materials. In this work, a novel photocatalyst comprising molybdenum telluride quantum dots (MoTe₂ QDs)-modified titanium dioxide nanorods (TiO₂ NRs) was prepared for the enhancement of the PEC water splitting performance after combination with a Al₂O₃ layer using the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique. MoTe₂ QDs were initially prepared, and then they were loaded onto TiO₂ NRs using a warm water bath-based heating method. After a layer of Al₂O₃ was deposited onto resulted TiO₂ NRs/MoTe₂ QDs, the composite TiO₂ NRs/MoTe₂ QDs/Al₂O₃ was finally obtained. Under simulated sunlight (100 mW·cm⁻²), such a composite exhibited a maximum photocurrent density of 2.25 mA·cm⁻² at 1.23 V (versus RHE) and an incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiency of 69.88% at 380 nm, which are 4.33 and 6.66 times those of pure TiO₂ NRs, respectively. Therefore, the composite photocatalyst fabricated in this work may have promising application in the field of PEC water splitting, solar cells and other photocatalytic devices.

Keywords

MoTe₂ quantum dot / TiO₂ nanorod / Al₂O₃ / atomic layer deposition / photoelectrochemistry

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Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52205230 and U21A2046), the Key Research and Development Program in Shandong Province (No. SYS202203), the Program for Taishan Scholars of Shandong Province (No. TS20190965), the Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. ZDBS-ZRKJZ-TLC010), the Western Light Project of CAS (xbzg-zdsys-202118), the Major Science and Technology Projects in Gansu Province (No. 22ZD6GA002), and the Major Program of the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS (No. ZYFZFX-5) for providing financial support.

Online appendix

Electronic supplementary material (ESM) can be found in the online version at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11706-024-0686-8 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/foms/EN/10.1007/s11706-024-0686-8 that includes Figs. S1–S5.

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