| Abstract
| - Various amounts of vanadium have been isomorphously substituted for titanium in ETS-10, creating sampleswith V/(V+Ti) ratios of 0.13, 0.33, 0.43, and 1.00 and characterized experimentally using Raman, near-edgeX-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), X-ray powder diffraction, N2 adsorption, scanning electronmicroscopy (SEM), UV/vis spectroscopy, and diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy(DRIFTS). Raman spectra reveal a disordered chain structure that contains different V−O bonds along withthe presence of a V−O−Ti peak. The UV/vis spectra of the vanadium samples have three new absorptionfeatures in the visible region at 450, 594, and 850 nm, suggesting both V4+ and V5+ are present in the samples.NEXAFS results confirm the presence of both V5+ and V4+ in the vanadium samples, with a fraction of V4+within the range of 0.2−0.4. The addition of vanadium lowers the band gap energy of ETS-10 from 4.32 eVto a minimum of 3.58 eV for the 0.43ETVS-10 sample. Studies of the photocatalytic polymerization of ethyleneshow that the 594 nm transition has no photocatalytic activity. The visible transition around 450 nm in thevanadium-incorporated samples is photocatalytically active, and the lower-concentration vanadium sampleshave higher photocatalytic activity than that of ETS-10 and AM-6, the all-vanadium analogue of ETS-10.
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