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) H2 generation performance in sunlight excitation. The H2 evolution rate is about 764 μmol 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.