Hydrothermally Synthesizing Nanospheres of Pd Loaded TiO2 for Photocatalytically Reducing CO2 in Isopropanol to Isopropyl Formate

Photocatalytic reduction of CO₂ was carried out on villiform spherical catalysts of Pd-TiO₂ in isopropanol solution. The catalysts were synthesized by hydrothermal method, their structures, morphologies and optical absorption properties were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and UV-vis absorption spectroscopy (UV-vis). The photocatalytic activities with different loading amounts and morphologies were evaluated for determining the dominant effect and optimizing the catalyst preparation. Based on a villiform spherical TiO₂ with the largest specific surface area in our experiments, we prepared a set of catalysts with various loading amounts of palladium and tested them by bubbling CO₂ through the slurry of catalyst and isopropanol. The highest formation rate of isopropyl formate was 276.6 μmol/g·cat/h. Eventually we proposed the reaction mechanism.