Yellow tungsten oxide, namely tungsten trioxide or WO3, is a kind of semiconductor material having excellent performance and wide applications. As a semiconductor photocatalyst, tungsten trioxide has a wide range of applications in the fields of photolysis of water to produce hydrogen and oxygen, and degradation of organic pollutants or inorganic pollutants. However, the photocatalytic activity of WO3 needs to be further improved to make better use of solar energy. In this regard, the experts have proposed a method to improve the photocatalytic activity of yellow tungsten oxide.

In recent years, semiconductor photocatalytic research has developed rapidly. Wherein, yellow tungsten oxide (tungsten trioxide /WO3) has become more and more attractive as a photocatalyst. Tungsten trioxide catalyst has the advantages of stable catalytic performance, no secondary pollution, no photo-corrosion and no toxicity. Therefore, it is widely used in photocatalytic water splitting. Some experts researched the photocatalytic activity of WO3 and found that the optimal oxygen production of WO3 is about 79.9 μmol/(L·h) under visible light radiation.

Do you know how to improve the photocatalytic property of yellow tungsten oxide? As a photocatalyst, yellow tungsten oxide (tungsten trioxide/WO3) has broad application prospects in photolysis of water, and degradation of organic and inorganic pollutants in the atmosphere and under water. However, the band gap of WO3 is 2.7eV, so that it can only absorb and use the part with less than 450nm wavelength in sunlight, and can only use about 10% of the energy in solar energy. In other words, at present, WO3 photocatalyst generally has shortcomings such as short absorption wavelength, low solar spectrum utilization, and high carrier recombination rate.

The photocatalytic performance of nonmetal-doped yellow tungsten oxide as a photocatalyst is improved compared to pure WO3. This is because compared with O2p orbitals, nonmetal ions such as C, N, F and S have orbits with relatively high energy. Substituting some of O atoms in semiconductor oxides (such as WO3) with the abovementioned atoms may increase the position of the valence band of the semiconductor, reduce the semiconductor band gap width, and make its absorption edge red shift.