BiOCl modified TiO2 based catalyst with enhanced hydrogen generation properties under visible light via promote photogenerated electron-hole separation

Due to its wide band gap and low photogenerated carrier separation efficiency, TiO2 has an undesirable photocatalytic activity. In the present work, BiOCl was hydrothermally deposited on TiO2 and BiOCl/TiO2 composites with different ratios were obtained. The results show that 30 % BiOCl/TiO2 has the best performance of 1354.94 μmolg−1h−1, which is 18.4 times than pure TiO2 and 73.1 times than pure BiOCl. The significant increase in the photocatalytic efficiency of BiOCl/TiO2 composites is attributed to the reduction of their bandgap width and the fast separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. This work brings a new idea to increase the photocatalytic hydrogen production capability of TiO2.