Significant improvement of photocatalytic hydrogen evolution rate over g-C3N4 with loading CeO2@Ni4S3

The g-C3N4 is an excellent photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution, but it is limited to only ultraviolet light by the wide band gap. In this work, the photocatalytic performance of g-C3N4 was enhanced by loading of CeO2@Ni4S3 cocatalyst. The XRD analysis result showed that CeO2@Ni4S3/g-C3N4 was successfully synthesized by one-step hydrothermal method. UV-vis analysis shows that the visible light absorption range of photocatalyst becomes larger with the addition of CeO2@Ni4S3. And the analysis results of PL and photo-electrochemical indicate that the electron transfer rate of the photocatalyst becomes faster with the addition of CeO2@Ni4S3. The rate of hydrogen evolution of CeO2@Ni4S3/g-C3N4 composite reaches to 3.74 mmol h(-1) g(-1) under visible light, it is 12 times that of pure g-C3N4. And CeO2@NI4S3/g-C3N4 catalyst still has high photocatalytic activity after 4 cyclic reactions under visible light irradiation. Therefore, CeO2@Ni4S3/g-C3N4 will be a potential excellent photo catalyst in the future.