MoSe₂/g-C₃N₄ heterojunction coupled with Pt nanoparticles for enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

The inefficiency of charge separation is the major practically limited factor towards high hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) of photocatalysts. Therefore, design and construction of efficient photocatalysts system with efficient charge transfer path is urgently necessary for HER. Herein, we report an effective strategy to construct Pt–MoSe2/g-C3N4 heterostructure through integrating facile solvothermal technique and solution-phase hybridization method. The synthesized ternary Pt–MoSe2/g-C3N4 heterostructures exhibit greatly enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen production than bare g-C3N4 and Pt/g-C3N4 catalyst. The enhancement factor is directly correlated with strong photosynergistic effect of charge-carrier generation and separation path coupling heterojunction sensitization on MoSe2/g-C3N4 with Pt nanoparticle. Moreover, the mechanism of enhanced catalytic activity is fully studied by electrochemical characterizations and photocurrent analysis.Ministry of Education (MOE)Accepted versionThe authors acknowledge the financial support from the Scientific research projects funded by Hebei talent project training funds (A201803003), the Program for the Young Top Talents of Hebei Province, the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (grant no. B2019402082) and the Science and Technology Research and Development Projects of Handan City (19422111008-16), W.L. Zhen and C. Xue thank the support from the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under AcRF-Tier 2 (MOE2018-T2-1-017) and AcRF-Tier 1 (MOE2019-T1-002- 012, RG102/19)