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 SrTiO ₃ 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. Pd@B9N5-TiO₂ prepared by sol-gel and Pd-photo deposition methods show very high hydrogen evolution (1000 μmol/g) from glucose aqueous solution compared to reported B, N-TiO₂ catalyst and also exhibit good stability upon long time irradiation.