Cobalt Phosphide Modified Titanium Oxide Nanophotocatalysts with Significantly Enhanced Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution from Water Splitting

Xinzheng Yue; Shasha Yi; Runwei Wang; Zongtao Zhang; Shilun Qiu

doi:10.1002/smll.201603301

Cobalt Phosphide Modified Titanium Oxide Nanophotocatalysts with Significantly Enhanced Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution from Water Splitting

Small. 2017 Apr;13(14). doi: 10.1002/smll.201603301. Epub 2017 Feb 2.

Authors

Xinzheng Yue¹, Shasha Yi², Runwei Wang¹, Zongtao Zhang¹, Shilun Qiu¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China.
² Key Laboratory of Automobile Materials, Ministry of Education, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun, 130022, China.

PMID: 28151577
DOI: 10.1002/smll.201603301

Abstract

Production of hydrogen from photocatalytic water splitting holds promise as an alternative energy source with superiority of cleanliness, environment friendliness, low price, and sustainability. Perfectly constructing the noble-metal-free and stable hybrid structure photocatalyst is quite essential; herein, for the first time the authors aim to use cobalt phosphide as the cocatalyst on titanium oxide to form a novel hybrid structure to enhance the utilization of the photoexcited electrons in redox reactions for improved photocatalytic H₂ evolution activity. Thus, the achieved significantly increased photocatalytic H₂ -evolution rate on the optimized CoP/TiO₂ (8350 µmol h^-1 g^-1 ) is 11 times higher than that of the pristine TiO₂ . Moreover, this work is expected to spur more insight into synthesizing such novel photofunctional systems, achieving high photocatalytic H₂ evolution activity and sufficient stability for solar-to-chemical conversion and utilization.

Keywords: cobalt phosphide; hybrids; photocatalytic water splitting; titanium dioxide.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't