Nickel-assisted synthesis of elemental crystalline phosphorus photocatalyst for efficient hydrogen evolution

作者：Wu, Chunxiao; Dong, Yi; Ng, Yun Hau^*; Liu, Yuxi; Deng, Jiguang; Jing, Lin^*; Dai, Hongxing

来源：Sustainable Materials and Technologies, 2023, 35: e00551.

DOI：10.1016/j.susmat.2022.e00551

• Red phosphorus
• Elemental photocatalyst
• Ni co-catalyst
• Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

Morphological modulation of elemental red phosphorus (RP) is achieved via a metallic nickel (Ni)-promoted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) strategy to enhance its photocatalytic hydrogen generation activities. The presence of Ni in the synthesis facilitates two synergetic effects on the as-prepared crystalline RP photocatalysts: i) optimized architecture of regular microrod structures to increase the surface area and reaction sites; ii) Ni nanoparticle on the RP serves as the co-catalyst to suppress the undesired deep charge trapping and recombi-nation by improving the surface charge separation efficiency. As a result, the optimized Ni@RP catalyst dem-onstrates a ca. 12-fold enhancement in the visible-light photocatalytic hydrogen evolution than that of the amorphous RP. The discovery of the natural growth of elemental P promoted by transition metal catalysts in this work may provide new insights into developing other favorable elemental catalysts for various applications.

• 单位
  北京科技大学; 北京工业大学