NiPS3 ultrathin nanosheets as versatile platform advancing highly active photocatalytic H2 production

Jingrun Ran; Hongping Zhang; Sijia Fu; Mietek Jaroniec; Jieqiong Shan; Bingquan Xia; Yang Qu; Jiangtao Qu; Shuangming Chen; Li Song; Julie M Cairney; Liqiang Jing; Shi-Zhang Qiao

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-32256-6

NiPS₃ ultrathin nanosheets as versatile platform advancing highly active photocatalytic H₂ production

Nat Commun. 2022 Aug 6;13(1):4600. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32256-6.

Authors

Jingrun Ran^#¹, Hongping Zhang^#², Sijia Fu^#¹, Mietek Jaroniec³, Jieqiong Shan¹, Bingquan Xia¹, Yang Qu⁴, Jiangtao Qu⁵, Shuangming Chen⁶, Li Song⁶, Julie M Cairney⁷, Liqiang Jing⁴, Shi-Zhang Qiao⁸

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia.
² State Key Laboratory of Environmentally Friendly Energy Materials, Engineering Research Center of Biomass Materials (Ministry of Education), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, 621010, Mianyang, Sichuan, China.
³ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry & Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Functional Inorganic Material Chemistry (Ministry of Education), School of Chemistry and Materials Science, International Joint Research Center for Catalytic Technology, Heilongjiang University, 150080, Harbin, P. R. China.
⁵ Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
⁶ National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, University of Science and Technology of China, 230029, Hefei, Anhui, P. R. China.
⁷ School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
⁸ School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia. [email protected].

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

High-performance and low-cost photocatalysts play the key role in achieving the large-scale solar hydrogen production. In this work, we report a liquid-exfoliation approach to prepare NiPS₃ ultrathin nanosheets as a versatile platform to greatly improve the light-induced hydrogen production on various photocatalysts, including TiO₂, CdS, In₂ZnS₄ and C₃N₄. The superb visible-light-induced hydrogen production rate (13,600 μmol h^-1 g^-1) is achieved on NiPS₃/CdS hetero-junction with the highest improvement factor (~1,667%) compared with that of pure CdS. This significantly better performance is attributed to the strongly correlated NiPS₃/CdS interface assuring efficient electron-hole dissociation/transport, as well as abundant atomic-level edge P/S sites and activated basal S sites on NiPS₃ ultrathin nanosheets advancing hydrogen evolution. These findings are revealed by the state-of-art characterizations and theoretical computations. Our work for the first time demonstrates the great potential of metal phosphorous chalcogenide as a general platform to tremendously raise the performance of different photocatalysts.