A mild and simple method to fabricate commercial TiO2 (P25) and C60 composite for highly enhancing H2 generation

Abstract Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution from water is a valid method to face the challenge of energy shortage. TiO2, as the most well-known and investigated semiconductor photocatalyst, has been extensively applied in this field. However, the hydrogen evolution performance of TiO2 suffer from low efficiency due to the high combination of photo-induced carries and the narrow light utilization range resulting from wide band gap. In this work, we use the commercial TiO2 (P25) and fullerene (C60) as precursors to construct an efficient photocatalyst via a mild mixed method. The introduction of C60 not only effectively broaden light absorption, but also suppressed the recombination of photo-generated carriers on TiO2. The photocatalytic water splitting property of the optimum sample achieve 597.2 μmol g−1 h−1, which is 31 times higher than pure P25.