Investigation Of SnO₂Inverse Opal Films And Their Photocatalytic Properties

As the world’s wide population has grown larger and larger, here comes upthe production and the consumption. As a result, the environment is gettingworse and worse. With Japanese scientists, whose name are Fujishima andHonda, firstly discovered the phenomenon that water could be degradation withsemiconductor TiO₂exposed under the UV light, people saw the hope that wecould use semiconductor as photocatalysis to decomposition the organicpollutant. Nowadays, research field of photocatalysis is of great interest toscientist.As a n type semiconductor, SnO₂has a wide band width of3.6eV and is ofgreat gas sensing, pressure sensing, thermal sensing, electrical, optical andcatalytic properties. More and more researchers began to pay attention to it’sphotocatalytic property. In this paper, we fully introduced the situation of SnO₂and analyzed the mechanism of photocatalytic property.In this paper, inverse opal films （IOFs） of SnO₂doped with Pd or Pt wereprepared by the self-assembly technique using polystyrene microsphere （PSsphere） as template in combination with a sol-gel method. We use XRD, SEM,XPS and UV-Vis to test the samples.Influencing factors like morphology, dopant and its amount ofphotocatalytic degradation properties were fully discussed.The result shows that SnO₂IOFs were synthesized with a goodphotocatalytic activity. By controlling the amount of the sol-gel adding in, wesuccessfully obtained the SnO₂IOFs. Through a series of testing, we know SnO₂of the films was of tetragonal structure and about20nm. Both the morphology,dopant and its amount have an positive impact. The solution of MB （MethyleneBlue） was degradated over60%in4hours when it was dipped in SnO₂IOFs andexposed in the UV light, which is2times faster than dipped in normal SnO₂film.The addition of Pd in SnO₂IOFs improved the photocatalytic activity of thefilms and the degradation of MB can exceed80%with the same condition. Theaddition of Pt in SnO₂IOFs improved the photocatalytic activity of the filmsand the degradation of MB can exceed89%with the same condition. This sort of SnO₂IOFs doped with Pd or Pt indicated a potential application inphotocatalysis field.