Enhancement of Visible-Light Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production by CeCO3OH in g-C3N4/CeO2 System

Promoting the separation of photo-generated carriers is significantly important to improve the efficiency of photocatalytic hydrogen production. Therefore, we prepared g-C3N4/CeCO3OH/CeO2 (CeCeCN) ternary nanocomposite via an easy synthetic way using g-C3N4 and CeO2 as reactants. A CeCO3OH layer was formed and resulted in the novel ternary photocatalyst. The CeCeCN composite shows superior photocatalytic (PC) H-2 generation performance in sunlightexcitation. The H-2 evolution rate is about 764 mu mol h(-1) g(-1), which is over 11 times larger than those of g-C3N4 and CeO2. Compared with g-C3N4 and CeO2, CeCeCN further shows a larger photo-response current density and a lower charge-transfer resistance. The remarkably increased photocatalytic property of CeCeCN is because of the efficient charge migration induced by the formed heterojunction. Our findings demonstrate that building multi-heterostructures can liberate more excited electrons for efficient hydrogen production under sunlight.