Synthesis Of Metastable CdS Nanocubes For Photocatalytic Water Splitting

Population growth and industrial development cause huge combustion of fossil fuel,which results in serious green house effect during the recent years.Photocatalytic water splitting is considered as a promising path towards the clean generation of hydrogen and thus has attracted broad global attention.Metastable phases can give rise to improved molecule adsorption as well as lower activation energy,and both of which are appropriate for the catalytic activity.However,the synthesis of metastable materials is hard to achieve especially with controlled facets.The specific innovative research results are as follows:1.In order to achieve better charge-flow steering and alleviate photocorrosion of CdS materials during catalytic reactions,especially in aqueous media containing oxygen under light irradiation,we synthesized CdS nanocubeswith zinc-blende phase and coordinated facets by using PbS nanocubes as the template and further performing ion exchange,ultimately,thus overcame the bottleneck of instablility of CdS zinc-blende phase at large size,and controlled the morphology and phase structure simutanously.2.We further prepared irregularly shaped zinc-blende CdS nanoparticles and wurtzite CdS nanoparticles,and comopare their photocatalytic hydrogen generation properties with CdS nanocubes.The zinc-blende CdS nanocubes exhibit superior properties over that of the other two samples,comfirming the advantages of the metastable phase.3.Both experimental and theoretical calculation clearly demon stated that zinc-blende CdS nanocubes ensure well steered charge flow and facets engineering is promising to achieve distinct charge separation and reaction activation energy for efficient photocatalytic water splitting.These fundamental investigations can illustrate facet-phase-performance relationship in zinc-blende-CdS-photocatalyzed H2 evolution.