Carbon intercalated MoS2 cocatalyst on g-C3N4 photo-absorber for enhanced photocatalytic H2 evolution under the simulated solar light

Despite MoS2 being a promising non-precious-metal cocatalyst, poor electronic conductivity and low activity for hydrogen evolution caused by serious agglomeration have been identified as critical roadblocks to further developing MoS2 cocatalyst for photocatalytic water splitting using solar energy. In this work, the density functional theory calculations reveal that carbon intercalated MoS2 (C-MoS2) has excellent electronic transport properties and could effectively improve catalytic activity. The experiment results show that the prepared tremella-like C-MoS2 nanoparticles have large interlayer spacing along the c-axis direction and high dispersion because of intercalation of the carbon between adjacent MoS2 layers. Furthermore, the heterostructure photocatalyst of C-MoS2@g-C3N4 formed by loading the cocatalyst of C-MoS2 onto g-C3N4 nanosheets exhibits the H2 evolution rate of 157.14 μmolg−1h−1 when containing 5 wt% C-MoS2. The high photocatalytic H2 production activity of the 5 wt% C-MoS2@g-C3N4 can be attributed to the intercalated conductive carbon layers in MoS2, which leads to efficient charge separation and transfer as well as increased activities of the edge S atoms for H2 evolution. We believe that the C-MoS2 will offer great potential as a photocatalytic H2 evolution reaction cocatalyst with high efficiency and low cost.