Electronic structure and photocatalytic properties of In6WO12

In this paper, indium tungsten oxide In6WO12 was prepared by a solid-state reaction method. The sample that was obtained was characterized by x-ray diffraction (XRD), ultraviolet–visible (UV–vis) spectroscopy and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) measurement. According to the diffuse reflectance spectra of the sample, the band gap is estimated to be 3.3 eV. The photocatalytic properties of the In6WO12 sample were evaluated by photo-decomposing acetaldehyde. The experimental results showed that the acetaldehyde could be mineralized to CO2 over In6WO12 under Xe lamp irradiation. The optimized crystal structure and calculated ground-state electronic structure of In6WO12 were also reported by using the standard CASTEP package.