Photochemical Deposition of Amorphous MoS on One-dimensional NaNbO-CdS Heterojunction Photocatalysts for Highly Efficient Visible-light-driven Hydrogen Evolution

A novel ternary MoSx-CdS-NaNbO3 (MoSx-CN) photocatalyst was successfully fabricated through a two-step method (hydrothermal synthesis and photo-deposition step). The results demonstrated that CdS nanoparticles and amorphous MoSx uniformly dispersed on one-dimensional (1D) NaNbO3 nanowires, thus forming multi-junctions (CdS-NaNbO3, CdS-MoSx and NaNbO3-MoSx) that could increase the migration efficiency of photo-excited charge carriers. In addition, an abundance of unsaturated sulfur atoms in MoSx led to a strong attraction to H+, thus providing active sites for water splitting. Consequently, the optimized composite sample (MoSx-CN-100) exhibited a hydrogen (H2) evolution efficiency of 2.386 mmol g-1 h-1, which was about 125.58 and 11.93 times that of NaNbO3 and CdS, respectively. Moreover, the ternary photocatalyst also exhibited excellent stability in the long-term hydrogen production process compared with the binary and single samples. Our work provided new insight into the rational design of multi-heterojunction photocatalysts with high efficiency for H2 evolution under visible light irradiation.