Degradation and Photocatalytic Properties of Nanocomposites

Abstract

The world is suffering from energy consumption and environmental pollution challenges for the next generation era. The developments in the construction of sustainable resources to overcome the energy crises have been made in several ways to compete with the depletion of fossil fuels. Among those, photocatalytic hydrogen production has proven to be an alternative for sustainable and green energy production pathways in nanoscience and technologies. Thus, hydrogen production technologies are renowned for renewable feedstock and greenhouse gas-free technology. Since the technology has been introduced, several strategies have been adopted to develop efficient catalyst materials to be employed for splitting water molecules for hydrogen production under solar light. The fundamental engineering for tuning the nanocomposite materials in photocatalytic applications requires special features of the catalyst materials to be addressed. Among those, the selection of materials with cheap, earth-abundant, and environmentally friendly characteristics may apply to large-scale industrial projects with state-of-the-art enhanced performance. For designing such nanocomposite materials, carbon and carbon-based 2D materials combined with metal oxides are considered significant achievements in energy and environmental applications due to the enhanced surface area and possible intra-junctions of the catalyst materials. These specific features of the nanocomposite materials set footprints for developing more efficient photocatalyst materials for broader sustainable energy applications, i.e., photo-(electro)catalytic green fuel production.Towards environmental concerns, various strategies have been used to deal with environmental pollution issues by converting pollutants by degrading them completely into less hazardous species. Similar to the above-mentioned photocatalytic applications, the design of materials for photodegradation also works on the concept of band structures combined in developing heterojunctions, which highly improves the charge separation efficiency and redox behavior of the photodegradation materials due to the photo-induced phenomenon.