Graphene-supported LaFeO3 for photocatalytic hydrogen energy production

Hydrogen is a green, environmentally benign and sustainable energy source with no harmful combustion products to fulfil the increasing energy demand. Photocatalytic oxidation has various advantageous to produce hydrogen from different sources such as wastewater, alcohol solutions using different types of catalysts. Sucrose solution was chosen as a model solution to evolve hydrogen using LFO and GLFO catalysts under solar light irradiation, and graphene was used as a catalyst support to enhance the amount of produced hydrogen amount. A characterization study, which consists of SEM-EDX, BET, XRD, PL, TEM, XPS and FT-IR analyses, was carried out. A full factorial design was created via Minitab 18 to analyse the factors affecting the produced hydrogen amount, which are pH, catalyst loading, H2O2 concentration and graphene content statistically. Based on the results, graphene content is an important parameter and pH and H2O2 concentration have a synergetic effect over hydrogen production. Additionally, the effects of calcination temperature, pH, H2O2 concentration and catalyst loading over produced gases were investigated. The best promising result was obtained as 3388 mu mol/g(cat) at the following reaction conditions: 7.5 of pH, 0.1 g L-1 catalyst loading (GLFO, which is calcined at 700 degrees C) and using 15 mM H2O2 under solar light irradiation.