Abstract
Designing low-cost, environment friendly, and highly active photocatalysts for water splitting is a promising path toward relieving energy issues. Herein, one-dimensional (1D) cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanorods are uniformly anchored onto two-dimensional (2D) NiO nanosheets to achieve enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. The optimized 2D/1D NiO/CdS photocatalyst exhibits a remarkable boosted hydrogen generation rate of 1,300 μmol h−1 g−1 under visible light, which is more than eight times higher than that of CdS nanorods. Moreover, the resultant 5% NiO/CdS composite displays excellent stability over four cycles for photocatalytic hydrogen production. The significantly enhanced photocatalytic activity of the 2D/1D NiO/CdS heterojunction can be attributed to the efficient separation of photogenerated charge carriers driven from the formation of p-n NiO/CdS heterojunction. This study paves a new way to develop 2D p-type NiO nanosheets-decorated n-type semiconductor photocatalysts for photocatalytic applications.
Highlights
Photocatalysis has been recognized as an auspicious strategy to confront the energy and environmental crises (Shao et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2019)
The Cadmium sulfide (CdS) exhibited rod-like morphology with a length of 100– 500 nm (Supplementary Figure 4). It can be observed in the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of 5% Nickel oxide (NiO)/CdS (Supplementary Figure 5) that the CdS nanorods were uniformly deposited onto the NiO nanosheets after hybridization treatment
The high-angle annular dark-field (HAADF) and the corresponding scanning transmission electron microscopy (TEM) energy dispersive x-ray (STEM-EDX) elemental mapping images of NiO/CdS (Figures 2e–i) illustrated that Ni and O were of homogeneous distribution in the NiO nanosheets, while Cd and S were in the rod-like CdS structures, implying the coexistence of 2D NiO nanosheets and 1D CdS nanorods in the NiO/CdS composite
Summary
Photocatalysis has been recognized as an auspicious strategy to confront the energy and environmental crises (Shao et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2019). The p-n NiSe2/CdS composites displayed a 2.7-fold higher photocatalytic hydrogen production rate than pristine CdS due to their effective separation and transfer of charge carriers (Chen et al, 2019). It is highly desirable to explore 2D NiO nanosheet-based p-n heterojunction photocatalysts for hydrogen production. The 5% NiO/CdS composite exhibited a prominently enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen evolution activity when compared with CdS nanorods. The photocatalytic mechanism of the 2D/1D NiO/CdS p-n heterojunction was proposed based on the photoluminescence (PL) and photoelectrochemical (PEC) tests. This current research highlights the advantages of the 2D/1D p-n heterojunctions toward improved photocatalytic hydrogen generation performance. After the H2 in the previous cycle was fully removed, the cycling tests for the photocatalytic H2 production were carried out under identical conditions
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