Titanium dioxide hierarchical microspheres decorated with atomically dispersed platinum as an efficient photocatalyst...

Micromorphology engineering and co-catalyst construction are considered as feasible approaches to boost the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance. Herein, we combined two approaches to construct a new photocatalyst with titanium dioxide (TiO₂) hierarchical microspheres (HMSs) as support and atomically dispersed platinum (Pt) species as co-catalyst (donated as TiO₂ HMSs@xPt). The as-prepared TiO₂ HMSs@xPt photocatalysts exhibited combined advantages including adequate light harvesting, improved charge-carrier separation and transport, abundant active sites, and reduced Pt consumption, which are favorable for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. Specifically, the optimized TiO₂ HMSs@0.36Pt exhibits a remarkable photocatalytic hydrogen evolution rate of 11.7 mmol g^-1h^-1 under simulated AM 1.5G solar light irradiation, which is 50 times and 4.8 times higher than those of pure TiO₂ HMSs and traditional anatase TiO₂ nanoparticles (NPs) with the same Pt loading, respectively.