Engineering surface oxygen defects on tungsten oxide to boost photocatalytic oxygen evolution from water splitting.

The engineering of surface oxygen vacancies (OVs) in WO3 was primitively done using a facile solvothermal method. The photocatalytic activities of the as-prepared samples were studied by evaluating their performances in the photocatalytic OER. The best sample (W-3) yielded 57.6 μmol of O2 in 6 h under the illumination of simulated sunlight.