Enhanced photocarrier separation in conjugated polymer engineered CdS for direct Z-scheme photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

By Yueging Hu, Xuqiang Hao, Zhiwei Cui, Junkang Zhou, Siqi Chu, Ying Wang, Z. Zou. 2020

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract High efficiency hydrogen generation from water has been achieved in sulfide-polymer heterojunction. In this work, a novel direct Z-scheme CdS/polyimide heterojunction was fabricated by in situ growth of CdS nanoparticles on polyimide (PI) ultrathin nanosheets through solvothermal method. The highest activity achieved on 15%CdS/PI sample reaches to H2-production rate of 613 μmol h−1 g−1 under visible-light irradiation, which is nearly 5 and 60 times higher than that of neat CdS and 1%Pt/PI. Most importantly, the excellent photostability is also achieved over 15% CdS/PI. The enhanced photocatalytic performance and photostability can be attributed to the direct Z-scheme charge transfer in the intimate interfacial between CdS and PI, which accelerates the charges separation and effective suppress of the photocorrosion in CdS/PI heterojunction. The direct Z-scheme charge transfer mechanism is evidenced by in-situ XPS analysis and time-resolved fluorescence (TRPL) decay. This work highlights the role of polymer in constructing efficient sulfide/polymer heterojunction photocatalyst.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cccdec3e58c12f5e1bf61e8cdbebb2e37c34d597