Emerging trends in glass-ceramic photocatalysts

Glass-ceramics, obtained through controlled crystallization of glasses, has emerged as an irreplaceable part of humans' day to day life due to their extensive use. Some recent studies have revisited these glass-ceramics for environmental applications. Major environmental issues such as water-cleaning, hydrogen generation, and bacterial disinfections, etc. can be solved using photocatalytic active glass-ceramics. Photocatalytic active glass-ceramics offer many advantages over the traditional photocatalysts such as flexibility of shape and size, high physical/chemical/thermal stability, easy fabrication, and repeatable performance. Thus, these materials have potential to provide real-time solutions to environmental problems. The present review introduces the concept of photocatalytic active glass-ceramics, highlights their advantages over traditional photocatalysts, provide the underlying mechanism of photocatalysis through glass-ceramics. In addition to this, the advancement and innovations done in this field by various researchers are reviewed. Finally, this review provides many new directions to work in the field of photocatalysis through glass-ceramics.