A review of ternary nanostructures based noble metal/semiconductor for environmental and renewable energy applications

Abstract

The environmental problems and the weakness of renewable energy source combined with the nanotechnological progress made so far through the application of new nanostructures system have necessitated presenting this work. However, it has been a long-standing request to design hetero-nanostructures that contain the maximum of intrinsic properties (optical, electrical and magnetic, etc.) with the addition of new generated properties, in order to meet the desires of industrials and researchers in all applications fields. Plasmonic noble-metals and metal oxides or semiconductors nanoparticles have been extensively explored to resolve a lot of environmental, health, industrial, technological and energie difficulties. Unfortunately, a single noble metals or semiconductors alone is difficult to satisfy all above necessities, which frequently suffers from limited light absorption region, serious electron–hole recombination, or lack of highly active surface sites. To resolve this bottleneck, the combination of noble metals and semiconductors was achieved. However, binary noble metal/semiconductor (sc) nanocomposites display multifunctional properties and high efficiency and are thus considered as promising hybrid nanomaterials for various applications and can solve many challenges. In recent years, a new class of nanomaterials called ternary nanostructures that combine three type of materials: especially noble metal/noble metal/semiconductor or noble metal/semiconductor/semiconductor hetero nanostructures. These original ternary nanostructures exhibit new generated-properties and high–performance activity compared to the precedent binary system. However, looking the literature review, few attempts are focused to prepare and study this new ternary nanostructure. In this context, the presented review paper aims to comprehensively introduce this new class of nanostructures and demonstrate its importance in many fields, this to encourage researchers to combine, study and apply different new ternary systems.

Keywords

• Ternary nanocomposites
• Renewable energy
• Environmental applications