Excellent photoelectrochemical activity of Bi2S3 nanorod/TiO2 nanoplate composites with dominant {001} facets

In this work, {001} facets exposed TiO2 nanoplates were loaded with Bi2S3 nanorods. The resulting Bi2S3/TiO2 photocatalyst exhibits considerable improvement in photoelectrochemical H-2 generation than pristine TiO2 nanoplates and Bi2S3 nanorods. The previous research mainly focused on the composite of Bi2S3 nanoparticles with rod-shaped TiO2, and utilized the advantage of large surface area of rod-shaped TiO2 to collect carriers. The advantage of this study is that Bi2S3 is supported on the {001} facets of TiO2 nanoplates, and the high-energy {001} facets and Bi2S3 are used to construct the heterojunction. The experimental results show that the Bi2S3/(001)TiO2 heterojunction has excellent photoelectrochemistry performance, and the photocurrent density of the composite photocatalyst is 20 times larger than that of the original TiO2, which is much higher than the 3-4 times of the literature. Experimental results confirm that {001} facets exposed TiO2 nanoplates are suitable for compositing with Bi2S3 to improve photoelectrochemical performance, which can be ascribed to the photoinduced carriers synergistic effect between TiO2 and Bi2S3. Thus, photo-generated electrons shift from the conduction band (CB) of Bi2S3 nanorods to the CB of TiO2 nanoplates after photo excitation, while photo-generated holes shift from the valence band (VB) of TiO2 nanoplates to the VB of Bi(2)S3 nanorods. Here, we demonstrate the significance of semiconductors composites in the improvement of photocatalysts.