Hydrogen production by an anaerobic photocatalytic reforming using palladium nanoparticle on boron and nitrogen doped TiO2 catalysts

The present work reports the renewable hydrogen production by an anaerobic photocatalytic reforming of glucose and methanol, using noble-metal and hetero-atom substituted TiO2 and sol-gel method prepared SrTiO3 as photocatalysts. XRD and SEM-EDX analysis confirm the typical anatase and rutile phase formation for B, N-doped TiO2 samples and palladium and other doped element existence confirmed by EDX analysis. These catalysts are preferred due to their identical wide band gap values of semiconductor oxide material. Interestingly, sol-gel method prepared B, N-doped TiO2 catalyst show higher activity compared to SrTiO3. The sluggishness of the photocatalytic transformation on SrTiO3 might be the reason for poor hydrogen evolution with 1% glucose solution under visible light. Pd9N5aTiO2 prepared by sol-gel and Pd-photo deposition methods show very high hydrogen evolution (1000 mu mol/g) from glucose aqueous solution compared to reported B, NaTiO2 catalyst and also exhibit good stability upon long time irradiation.