Facile construction of flower-like black phosphorus nanosheet@ZnIn2S4 composite with highly efficient catalytic performance in hydrogen production

Abstract

To make persistent efforts at enhancing hydrogen evolution driven by solar energy, this work, for the first time, had introduced flower-like ZnIn2S4 coupled with black phosphorus (BP) as efficient photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution with photo-deposited Pt assisted under visible light irradiation. The hydrogen evolution efficiency of BP, ZnIn2S4, 0.5%BP/ZnIn2S4, 0.5%Pt/BP, 0.5%Pt/ZnIn2S4 and 0.5%Pt/0.5%BP/ZnIn2S4 photocatalysts were successively conducted and results showed that both BP and Pt played an important role in enhancing the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution rate. Therefore, the ternary 0.5%Pt/0.5%BP/ZnIn2S4 composite exhibited the strongest hydrogen production efficiency at 1278 μmol/g/h, about 10 times higher than that of pristine ZnIn2S4 (131 μmol/g/h) and represented a highly stable characteristic after suffering four recycles. The promoting hydrogen evolution of ternary photocatalyst could be ascribed to the unique bandgap and larger two-dimensional plane structure of BP, which provided abundant landing sites for the anchor of flower-like ZnIn2S4, thus leading to a well-inhibited recombination and efficient separation of photogenerated electrons and hole pairs between ZnIn2S4 and BP. The remarkable photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance and prominent stability all indicated that 0.5%Pt/0.5%BP/ZnIn2S4 was a promising photocatalyst candidate for solar hydrogen production.