Directing Charge Transfer in a Chemical-Bonded BaTiO 3 @ReS 2 Schottky Heterojunction for Piezoelectric Enhanced Photocatalysis.

The piezo-assisted photocatalysis system, which can utilize solar energy and mechanical energy simulteneously, is promising but still challenging in the environmental remediation field. In this work, a novel metal-semiconductor BaTiO 3 @ReS 2 Schottky heterostructure is designed and it shows high-efficiency on piezo-assisted photocatalytic molecular oxygen activation. By combining experiment and calculation results, the distorted metal-phase ReS 2 nanosheets are found to be closely anchored on the surface of the BaTiO 3 nanorods, through interfacial ReO covalent bonds. The Schottky heterostructure not only forms electron-transfer channels but also exhibits enhanced oxygen activation capacity, which are helpful to produce more superoxide radicals. The polarization field induced by the piezoelectric BaTiO 3 can lower the Schottky barrier and thus reduce the transfer resistance of photogenerated electrons directing to the ReS 2 . As a result of the synergy effect between the two components, the BaTiO 3 @ReS 2 exhibits untrahigh activity for degradation of pollutants with an apparent rate constant of 0.133 min -1 for piezo-assisted photocatalysis, which is 16.6 and 2.44 times as that of piezocatalysis and photocatalysis, respectively. This performance is higher than most reported BaTiO 3 -based piezo-assisted photocatalysis systems. This work paves the way for the design of high-efficiency piezo-assisted photocatalytic materials for environmental remediation through using green energies in nature.