Fabrication of High-Performance Biomass Derived Carbon/Metal Oxide Photocatalysts with Trilevel Hierarchical Pores from Organic-Inorganic Network

Cost-effective biomass derived carbon is considered a highly attractive energy material while high-performance biochar based nanocomposites with well-defined structures are very desirable candidates for this application. Herein, a novel and feasible fabrication method with renewable plane tree fluff as the carbon source is proposed to synthesize hierarchical porous titanium dioxide (TiO2)/carbon nanocomposites covering full length scales. A hybrid inorganic/organic framework with sub 10 nm feature sizes is used as the metal source for building up a high-quality interface between phases, while bitemplates with ice and nanoscaled silica are introduced for porosity tuning. The as-prepared TiO2/C nanocomposite presents superior photocatalytic activity for organic pollutant degradation and excellent photo-electrochemical performance. More importantly, when loaded with a noble-metal-free carbide (Mo2C) prepared from a novel hydrothermal assisted fabrication route, it shows an outstanding hydrogen generation rate of 5.4 (UV) and 0.09 (visible light) mmol g(-1) h(-1) for water splitting, which are much better than the same sample loaded with Pt and benchmark P25. The present work proposes a dynamic and reliable tactic to synthesize a broad set of hierarchical porous metal oxide based nanocomposites, which is of far-reaching significance for the development of sustainable technology for environmental, energy, and catalysis applications.