Morphology-Dependent Activities of Silver Phosphates: Visible-Light Water Oxidation and Dye Degradation

Conversion of sunlight to storable solar fuels offers a convenient and a promising route to renewable energy that is more important on account of the limited availability of fossil fuels and its global environmental benefits. One of the best ways to generate solar fuels is by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen using visible-light photocatalysts. Presented is a facile, scalable, and convenient strategy for the preparation of silver phosphate (Ag₃ PO₄ ) particles with diverse morphology for visible-light water oxidation and dye degradation. Changing the solvents in the reactions resulted in altered morphology such as ellipsoids, irregular shapes, polyhedra, and sphere-type particles. These were then extensively characterized. Variation in the activity of photochemical water oxidation and dye degradation was observed during photocatalysis depending on the morphology, whereby the ellipsoids of Ag₃ PO₄ displayed enhanced catalytic performance.