Bifunctional thioacetamide-mediated synthesis of few-layered MoOSx nanosheet-modified CdS hollow spheres for efficient photocatalytic H2 production

Abstract

Constructing efficient cocatalyst-modified hollow-structured photocatalysts holds great potential in the photocatalytic H₂ evolution field. Regrettably, it still remains a formidable challenge to develop cost-effective cocatalysts and explore simple synthetic methods for their scalable applications. Herein, a novel one-step strategy of bifunctional thioacetamide-mediated synthesis has been developed to synthesize few-layered MoOS_x nanosheet-modified CdS hollow sphere photocatalysts (MoOS_x/CdS). In this case, the MoOS_x nanosheets exhibit a typical few-layered structure of 3–7 layers and are homogeneously attached to the surface of the CdS hollow spheres. It is observed that the few-layered MoOS_x/CdS (1 wt%) hollow sphere photocatalysts obtain the highest photocatalytic H₂-evolution rate of 929.40 μmol h⁻¹ g⁻¹, which is far beyond that of the blank CdS sample by a factor of 3.7. The in situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and density functional theory (DFT) analyses confirm that the well-designed few-layered MoOS_x cocatalysts can efficiently suppress photoexcited carrier recombination and provide abundant electron-deficient S sites to speed up the interfacial H₂-evolution reaction, thus improving the photocatalytic H₂-generation efficiency of the CdS photocatalysts. This study opens a new window into the fabrication of non-precious metal cocatalyst-modified hollow structures with remarkably promoted photocatalytic H₂-production activity.