Green and in-situ synthesis of noble-metal-free Ni2P/CdS nanoheterostructure for enhanced photocatalytic H2 generation activity

Hydrogen generation from photocatalytic water-splitting is a promising approach of renewable energy storage and has the potential to ease energy shortage. During the past few decades, various materials have been developed as photocatalysts. But most especial single photocatalytic systems still suffer from low efficiency and poor stability. Constructing heterostructures is considered as a good strategy to address those issues, but some drawbacks of safety hazard, time-consuming and energy-intensive still restrict its further application. In this manuscript, we successfully synthesized Ni2P/CdS nanohybrids by using a green and facile method. The as-synthesized Ni2P/CdS with Ni2P grown in-situ on CdS can remarkably inhibit electron-hole recombination, and thus renders more generated electrons involving in the reaction of H+ reduced into H-2. As a result, the optimized Ni2P/CdS heterostructure exhibits high photocatalytic performance with H-2 evolution rate of 44.65 mmol g(-1) h(-1), far exceeding that of pristine CdS by a factor of 127. This green synthesized strategy will inspire the fabrication of other photocatalytic systems and may low-cost, high efficient, and eco-friendly photocatalysts be obtained. (C) 2019 Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All All rights reserved.