Silver doped titanium dioxide nanomaterials for enhanced visible light photocatalysis

This paper presents a systematic study on two different preparation methods for titanium dioxide with silver. The silver can be incorporated by irradiating the reaction mixture during preparation to reduce silver ion to silver metal or by direct calcination of the sol–gel material to decompose silver nitrate to silver. Of the two methods, we found the latter produces a more effective photocatalytic material (6–50% improvement in catalytic efficiency), which is attributed to the fact that the silver is homogeneously dispersed throughout the material. The efficiency of the materials were examined using a Q-Sun solar simulator (visible light) and in Dublin summer sunlight (latitude 54°N). In both cases, the addition of increasing amounts of silver, for both batches of samples, significantly increases the rate of degradation of a model dye, rhodamine 6G (R6G), increasing the rate of degradation from 0.06 min−1 for TiO2 to 0.34 min−1 for 5 mol% Ag–TiO2. This is attributed to the increasing visible absorption capacity due to the presence of silver nanoparticles.