Enhancement of Visible‐Light Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production by CeCO3OH in g‐C3N4/CeO2 System

Abstract Promoting the separation of photo‐generated carriers is significantly important to improve the efficiency of photocatalytic hydrogen production. Therefore, we prepared g‐C 3 N 4 /CeCO 3 OH/CeO 2 (CeCeCN) ternary nanocomposite via an easy synthetic way using g‐C 3 N 4 and CeO 2 as reactants. A CeCO 3 OH layer was formed and resulted in the novel ternary photocatalyst. The CeCeCN composite shows superior photocatalytic (PC) H 2 generation performance in sunlight excitation. The H 2 evolution rate is about 764 μmol h −1 g −1 , which is over 11 times larger than those of g‐C 3 N 4 and CeO 2 . Compared with g‐C 3 N 4 and CeO 2 , CeCeCN further shows a larger photo‐response current density and a lower charge‐transfer resistance. The remarkably increased photocatalytic property of CeCeCN is because of the efficient charge migration induced by the formed heterojunction. Our findings demonstrate that building multi‐heterostructures can liberate more excited electrons for efficient hydrogen production under sunlight.