Monitoring the photodeposition of Pt and Cu nanoparticles on TiO2 for photocatalytic hydrogen production by operando XAS

TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) with supported metal co-catalysts are widely employed for hydrogen photocatalytic production. The optimization of these systems entails insight on the phenomena and reaction mechanisms involved at the molecular level, which is far from being complete. This proposal aims to reveal the evolution of metal species during the deposition of Pt/Cu NPs on TiO2 and the subsequent H2 photoproduction by combining Cu K-edge, Pt L3-edge XAS, UV-Vis spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Systematic variation of the synthetic procedure will help to clarify the role of each component on the final structure and reveal structure-activity relationships in the resulting catalysts. These results are expected to provide useful insights to design and synthesize photocatalytic systems with improved performance for H2 photoproduction.