MoS2 supported on hydrogenated TiO2 heterostructure film as photocathode for photoelectrochemical hydrogen production

Abstract

The substitution of noble metal platinum catalyst is one of the important research contents for sustainable development and is also the key to the practical application of photoelectrochemical (PEC) hydrogen production. In this work, we loaded the 1T-2H mixed phase MoS2 on the hydrogenated anatase/rutile heterophase TiO2 (A-H-RTNA) by hydrothermal method to prepare a new MoS2/A-H-RTNA electrode material. The prepared material exhibited higher carrier density, lower PL intensity and higher conductivity than Pt/A-H-RTNA because 1T-MoS2 has more active sites and lower charge transfer resistance than Pt. With the bias voltage of −0.4 V, the optimized 16MoS2/A-H-RTNA as photocathode shows the largest PEC hydrogen production rate of 1840 mmol m−2 h−1, which is 2.9 and 2.2 times higher than those of A-H-RTNA (625 mmol m−2 h−1) and Pt/A-H-RTNA (848 mmol m−2 h−1), respectively. We innovatively used the prepared 16MoS2/A-H-RTNA film as counter electrode instead of Pt electrode to construct a PEC system without any noble-metal. The result demonstrates that the noble-metal-free MoS2 loaded on TiO2 electrode as counter electrode has 75% PEC activity of noble metal Pt electrode. This study develops a PEC method for hydrogen evolution, which no longer depends on precious metal platinum as cathode.