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Mater Sci Nanotechnol 2017 | Volume 1 Issue 2
allied
academies
Nanomaterials and Nanochemistry
November 29-30, 2017 | Atlanta, USA
International Conference on
P
hotocatalytic water splitting technology has recently
received extensive attention as a promising method to
producehydrogen,whichhasgeneratedanurgentneedtofind
alternative photocatalyticmaterials for such technique. In the
present study, the electronic and photocatalytic properties
of SnO
2
under uniaxial strain have been examined, based on
density functional theory (DFT), showing that under tensile
strain the band gap energy decreases, while an opposite
behavior is demonstrated in the case of compression. Band
edge alignments of unstrained SnO
2
shows that the VBM is
more positive than the redox potential of O
2
/H
2
O (1.23V)
while the CBM for pH = lies above the redox potential of
H+/H
2
(0V), which mean that the pure SnO
2
cannot be used
for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Applying compressive
strain, the CBM edge position decreases gradually as the
strain percent increases, in other hand under tensile strain
the CBM edge position could be corrected for pH ≥ 10 which
clearly reveals the ability of mechanical strain to modulate
the band structure and the photocatalytic properties of SnO
2
in order to improve its suitability as a photo-catalyst for
water splitting.
e:
zz.kerrami@gmail.comPotential of strained SnO
2
as a photo-catalyst for water splitting process
Kerrami Z
Mohammed V University, Morocco