Enhancing photocatalytic hydrogen production through Schottky junctions formed by decorating large-sized cocatalysts with small-sized photocatalysts
Heyu Li, Haiyu Wang, Lingjiao Li, Xiaoli Ma, Youji Li, Zhiliang Jin
Abstract
Photogenerated carriers can be effectively recombined to form reduced through the rational design of semiconductors, which is a highly effective strategy for performance enhancement of photocatalytic hydrogen generation . The study found that, a stable photocatalyst CdZnS-Ni 3 V 2 O 8 was synthesized by assembling Ni 3 V 2 O 8 and nano-CdZnS, the rate of recombination of the photogenerated charge carriers can be effectively reduced. When exposed to visible light , CdZnS-Ni 3 V 2 O 8 showed strong hydrogen evolution activity, hydrogen production achieved 789 μmol within 5 hours, surpassing that of pure CdZnS photocatalyst by 12.7 times. Moreover, the catalyst displays remarkable stability, with no appreciable decline in hydrogen production activity even after four cycles. Mechanism results demonstrate that excellent photocatalytic to perform is to attributed to the creation of Schottky junction by small-sized CdZnS and large-sized Ni 3 V 2 O 8 . Additionally, large-sized cocatalysts Ni 3 V 2 O 8 is able to act as an electron transfer bridge through its metallic features in the mixed phase. The above conclusions were also confirmed by calculated using Density Functional Theory (DFT). This work presents simple and efficient approach for construction efficient and stable composite photocatalytic materials for hydrogen energy utilization and environmental protection.