NiPS3 ultrathin nanosheets as versatile platform advancing highly active photocatalytic H2 production
Jingrun Ran, Hongping Zhang, Sijia Fu, Mietek Jaroniec, Jieqiong Shan, Bingquan Xia, Yang Qu, Jiangtao Qu, Shuangming Chen, Li Song, Julie M. Cairney, Liqiang Jing, Shi‐Zhang Qiao
Abstract
Abstract High-performance and low-cost photocatalysts play the key role in achieving the large-scale solar hydrogen production. In this work, we report a liquid-exfoliation approach to prepare NiPS 3 ultrathin nanosheets as a versatile platform to greatly improve the light-induced hydrogen production on various photocatalysts, including TiO 2 , CdS, In 2 ZnS 4 and C 3 N 4 . The superb visible-light-induced hydrogen production rate (13,600 μmol h −1 g −1 ) is achieved on NiPS 3 /CdS hetero-junction with the highest improvement factor (~1,667%) compared with that of pure CdS. This significantly better performance is attributed to the strongly correlated NiPS 3 /CdS interface assuring efficient electron-hole dissociation/transport, as well as abundant atomic-level edge P/S sites and activated basal S sites on NiPS 3 ultrathin nanosheets advancing hydrogen evolution. These findings are revealed by the state-of-art characterizations and theoretical computations. Our work for the first time demonstrates the great potential of metal phosphorous chalcogenide as a general platform to tremendously raise the performance of different photocatalysts.