Enhanced visible light photocatalytic H2-production of g-C3N4/WS2 composite heterostructures

As a clean and renewable solar H-2-production system to address the increasing global environmental crisis and energy demand, photocatalytic hydrogen production from water splitting using earth abundant materials has received a lot of attention. In this study, WS2-graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) composites were prepared using WO3 and thiourea as precursors through a gas-solid reaction. Different amount of WS2 were loaded on g-C3N4 to form the heterostructures and the composite samples exhibited enhanced photocatalytic activity for H-2 production under visible light. The composite sample with 0.01 wt% WS2 exhibited the highest H-2-production rate of 101 timol g(-1) h(-1), which was even better than that of the Pt-C3N4 sample with the same loading content. The high photocatalytic activity was attributed to the formation of heterojunction between g-C3N4 and WS2 cocatalyst which allowed for effective separation of photogenerated charge carriers. This work showed the possibility for the utilization of low cost WS2 as an efficient cocatalyst to promote the photocatalytic H-2 production of g-C3N4. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.