Highly efficient H2 production over NiCo2O4 decorated g-C3N4 by photocatalytic water reduction

By Wenxi Chang, Wenhua Xue, E. Liu, Jun Fan, Binran Zhao. Chemical Engineering Journal, 2019

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Herein, ternary nickel cobalt oxide (NiCo2O4) was firstly employed to increase the photocatalytic water reduction ability of g-C3N4. 17.5 wt%-NiCo2O4/g-C3N4 shows excellent water splitting performance with a H2 production rate of 5480 μmol h−1 g−1, which is extremely better than that of Co3O4, NiO, Pt modified g-C3N4. The quantum efficiency of 17.5 wt%-NiCo2O4/g-C3N4 can reach 4.5% under 400 (±7.5) nm light irradiation. The greatly increased activity of 17.5 wt%-NiCo2O4/g-C3N4 can be attributed to the richer active sites and the superior electrical performance provided by co-existing nickel and cobalt ions with multivalent state. Moreover, the activity of composite almost shows no significant weaken even after 20 h irradiation. A Z-scheme route was put forwarded for H2 production over NiCo2O4/g-C3N4 instead of the traditional p-n junction based on our study.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1fc8bdef7f57498885aa3d98c9bc3cbf2976b9eb