Applications of Amorphous Nanomaterials in Photocatalysis

The potential applications of photocatalysis are found mainly in the following fields: photolysis of water to yield hydrogen fuel, photodecomposition or photo-oxidization of hazardous substances, artificial photosynthesis, and photoelectrochemical conversion. Nanomaterials can provide large surface areas, abundant surface states, diverse morphologies, and easy device modeling, all of which are properties beneficial to photocatalysis. This chapter introduces the application of amorphous materials in photocatalytic reactions. Photocatalysis technology has been proven to degrade organic pollutants in dye wastewater into nontoxic or low-toxic easily degradable small molecules. Electrochemistry not only promotes the separation of hot holes and hot electrons but also promotes the rate and stability of the catalytic reaction at the hot holes. Because the surface of the amorphous material has highly unsaturated sites and uniformly structured catalytic sites, it also has many applications in photo-electrocatalysis. Amorphous materials are often used as cocatalysts.