Utilization of Clinoptilolite as a Support of Nano-titania for Hydrogen Production via Water Splitting Process

Hydrogen evolution via water splitting was investigated over the nanostructured TiO2/clinoptilolite photocatalyst with the aim of exploring the natural zeolitic support potential on the photocomposite reactivity. To this aim, a clinoptilolite supported TiO2 photocatalyst with 30 wt. titania content was synthesized by the facile solid state dispersion SSD method. The samples were characterized by XRD, FESEM, EDX, BET, FTIR, PL and UV-vis techniques. The characterization results indicated that clinoptilolite utilization could not only reduce the recombination of electron–hole pairs but also promote the distribution of metallic particles and decrease the TiO2 particle agglomerations. The high photocatalytic activity, 134.16 , was obtained for the TiO2/clinoptilolite sample which was about 2 times more than that of bare TiO2. Furthermore, TiO2/clinoptilolite photocatalyst showed sufficient reusability, making it a good choice for photocatalytic water splitting applications.