Efficient photocatalytic hydrogen generation by CeCO3OH/TiO2 composites

Due to its low photogenerated carrier separation efficiency and wide band gap, the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 is not ideal. In this work, CeCO3OH/TiO2 composites were successfully prepared by a simple hydrothermal method. A series of characterisations shows that the CeCO3OH/TiO2 composites improves the photogenerated carrier separation efficiency, narrowes the band gap width and increases the visible light absorption capacity compared with the monomer, enhancing the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance. Under visible light irradiation, 20% CeCO3OH/TiO2 exhibites the highest photocatalytic hydrogen production performance of 2386.16 μmol g−1 h−1, which is 18.7 times higher than that of pure TiO2 and 25.8 times higher than that of pure CeCO3OH. It provides ideas for the development of more efficient photocatalytic materials and technologies.