Obtaining metallic centers on semiconductors in a hydrogen-reducing atmosphere

Up today, scientists work on the obtaining a highly active photocatalytic material, whose band excitation would be possible primarily using visible light (Domen, Kudo, & Onishi, 1986; Lei, Yu, Tang, & Zhu, 2017; Ni, Leung, Leung, & Sumathy, 2007). Such an achievement would allow to minimize the costs of energy used during photocatalytic processes. The most commonly used semiconductor for photocatalytic processes is TiO2. However, due to the considerable width of band gap (3.2 eV), it is necessary to modify it in order to achieve satisfactory photocatalytic reaction efficiency (Binas, Venieri, Kotzias, & Kiriakidis, 2017). One of the modification is the deposition on the semiconductor of precious metals, e.g. platinum, and the most commonly used methods for this purpose is photodeposition or chemical reduction. However, the proposed method of reduction with using hydrogen at elevated temperature after optimization is more precise and a cleaner method in the context of samples obtained on its way. Today, the literature presents few reports on the method of producing metallic centers on semiconductors under hydrogen reducing atmosphere, therefore it is necessary to optimize method.