Bifunctional thioacetamide-mediated synthesis of few-layered MoOSx nanosheet-modified CdS hollow spheres for efficient photocatalytic H2 production

Constructing efficient cocatalyst-modified hollow-structured photocatalysts holds great potential in the photocatalytic H2 evolution field. Regrettably, it still remains a formidable challenge to develop cost-effective cocatalysts and explore simple synthetic methods for their scalable applications. Herein, a novel one-step strategy of bifunctional thioacetamide-mediated synthesis has been developed to synthesize few-layered MoOSx nanosheet-modified CdS hollow sphere photocatalysts (MoOSx/CdS). In this case, the MoOSx nanosheets exhibit a typical few-layered structure of 3–7 layers and are homogeneously attached to the surface of the CdS hollow spheres. It is observed that the few-layered MoOSx/CdS (1 wt%) hollow sphere photocatalysts obtain the highest photocatalytic H2-evolution rate of 929.40 μmol h−1 g−1, which is far beyond that of the blank CdS sample by a factor of 3.7. The in situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and density functional theory (DFT) analyses confirm that the well-designed few-layered MoOSx cocatalysts can efficiently suppress photoexcited carrier recombination and provide abundant electron-deficient S sites to speed up the interfacial H2-evolution reaction, thus improving the photocatalytic H2-generation efficiency of the CdS photocatalysts. This study opens a new window into the fabrication of non-precious metal cocatalyst-modified hollow structures with remarkably promoted photocatalytic H2-production activity.