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

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.