Materials Science and Nanotechnology

Potential of strained SnO2 as a photo-catalyst for water splitting process

International Conference on Nanomaterials and Nanochemistry
November 29-30, 2017 | Atlanta, USA

Kerrami Z

Mohammed V University, Morocco

Posters & Accepted Abstracts : Mater Sci Nanotechnol

Abstract:

Photocatalytic water splitting technology has recently received extensive attention as a promising method to produce hydrogen, which has generated an urgent need to find alternative photocatalytic materials for such technique. In the present study, the electronic and photocatalytic properties of SnO2 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 SnO2 shows that the VBM is more positive than the redox potential of O2/H2O (1.23V) while the CBM for pH = lies above the redox potential of H+/H2 (0V), which mean that the pure SnO2 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 SnO2 in order to improve its suitability as a photo-catalyst for water splitting.

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