Towards a greener production of heterogeneous photocatalysts - CME Seminar Series Fall 2025

Photocatalytic processes have attracted great interest during the transition towards a greener and more sustainable society due to their potential to harvest sunlight and produce chemical transformations ranging from water splitting and CO2 reduction to the oxidation of organic molecules and pollutants.

Nevertheless, solutions for various drawbacks of existing photocatalytic technologies, and greener production of active materials for these applications, must be explored before their successful implementation in real applications in the short term.

Aiming to contribute with new knowledge to this field, from this PhD project conducted at NASEL group, a simple, liquid-assisted resonant acoustic mixing (RAM) process to produce CuOx-modified TiO2 heterostructures was explored. The proposed route of synthesis involved a mixture of precursors and a neglectable amount of water, resulting in the elimination of unnecessary work-up stages.

RAM acceleration and water content were adjusted to achieve the most homogenous catalysts that show a significant enhancement in photocatalytic hydrogen generation compared to pure TiO2. These promising results open the possibility to further explore RAM-based methods as greener synthesis routes for the obtention of a wider diversity of materials.