Construction of nanosized MoP decorated highly crystalline carbon nitride sphere as an excellent photocatalyst for boosted photocatalytic hydrogen production

Abstract

High-crystalline carbon nitride (HCCN) is recognized as a promising semiconductor photocatalyst in alleviating the energy crisis and protecting the environment in the current field of photocatalysis. However, the ordinary crystalline carbon nitride is generally morphologically irregular with few surfactant sites, which limits its further application. In this work, we successfully constructed spherical HCCN embedded with MoP nanoparticles as a co-catalyst by a simple calcination treatment to form a stable and efficient MoP-HCCN composite photocatalyst. As expected, as-prepared MoP-HCCN composites presented superior photocatalytic activities for water splitting into H 2 production, and the optimal 5 wt.% MoP-HCCN exhibited the optimum photocatalytic hydrogen production rate up to 10594.29 μmol·g -1 ·h -1 with the corresponding AQE reached 7.2%, which is 3.4 times than pristine HCCN and 109.9 times than amorphous carbon nitride (ACN), respectively. The significant promotion in photocatalytic property is mainly due to the synergistic reaction between MoP and HCCN for effectively enhancing the segregation and rapid transportation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. Finally, the feasible photocatalysis mechanism of MoP-HCCN compound photocatalyst is inferred. This work presents a promising design idea for developing efficient HCCN-based composite photocatalytic for hydrogen production.