Preparation of CdS-BaZrO₃ Heterojunction for Enhanced Photocatalytic Water-Splitting Hydrogen Production

Abstract

Photocatalytic water splitting using solar light, a promising technical approach for hydrogen production. However, the slow charge transfer and rapid recombination of photogenerated charge carriers in photocatalysis limit their practical application. To address these issues, in this work, we successfully prepared a novel CdS-BaZrO₃ (CdS-BZO₃) heterojunction via a simple chemical-bath deposition method. The as-prepared heterojunctions facilitate the separation and transportation of photogenerated charges, while also maintaining the high redox-oxid ation ability of the photocatalysts. As a result, CdS-BZO₃ heterojunctions show enhanced photocatalytic water-splitting hydrogen production ability without a co-catalyst. Especially, the optimized CdS-BZO₃ sample exhibits high photocatalytic activity with a hydrogen production rate of 44.77 μmol/h, which is 4.4 and 2.9 times higher than that of BZO₃ and CdS, respectively. At the same time, the CdS-BZO₃ heterojunction exhibits good stability in the photocatalytic hydrogen production cycle test. This work provides a reference for the heterostructure construction of perovskite-based photocatalysts to improve photocatalytic performance.

Keywords

Photocatalysis / Perovskite / BaZrO₃/CdS / Type I heterojunction / Hydrogen production

Supplementary Material

The following supporting information can be found at: https://www.sciepublish.com/article/pii/707, Figure S1: The xenon lamp light source system. Figure S2: The spectrum of the xenon lamp light source system. Figure S3: High-resolution TEM image of CdS-BZO₃-3 sample after photochemical deposition of Pt. Figure S4. High-resolution XPS spectrum for (a) Ba 3d; (b) Zr 3d; (c) Cd 3d; (d) S 2p, (e) XRD patterns, and (f) UV-vis absorption spectra of used CdS-BZO₃-3 heterojunction.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, S.S.A.S. and S.S.; Methodology, S.S.A.S., M.C. and J.Z.; Software, S.S.A.S.; Validation, M.C., P.W. and Y.C.; Formal Analysis, S.S.A.S. and T.D.; Investigation, M.C.; Resources, S.S.A.S. and M.C.; Data Curation, S.S.A.S.; Writing—Original Draft Preparation, S.S.A.S.; Writing—Review & Editing, S.S.A.S. and M.C.; Visualization, M.C.; Supervision, S.S.; Project Administration, S.S.; Funding Acquisition, S.S.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22308001, 21902001, and 22179001), Higher Education Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (KJ2021A0029 and KJ2021A0027), Distinguished Young Research Project of Anhui Higher Education Institution (022AH020007), The University Synergy Innovation Program of Anhui Province (GXXT-2023-009).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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