Construction of novel 1D nickel phosphonate nanorod modified 2D g-C₃N₄ nanosheets for enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance

Modifying g-C3N4 with cocatalysts is considered an efficient route to resolve the fast recombination of electron-hole pairs and promote photocatalytic hydrogen production performance. Herein, a facile hydrothermal method is proposed to fabricate a novel 1D nickel phosphonate (NiPPh) in situ loaded on 2D g-C3N4 nanosheets to act as a cocatalyst. With the aid of cocatalyst NiPPh, the intimate interface between CN and NiPPh can suppress the recombination of photogenerated carriers and enhance the transfer efficiency of photogenerated carriers for photocatalytic water splitting. The CN/NiPPh-1 sample demonstrates a photocatalytic hydrogen production rate of 261.0 mu mol h(-1) g(-1), approximately four times that of CN. The discovery in this work provides a novel insight that NiPPh can serve as an outstanding cocatalyst for designing efficient photocatalysts and the synthesis of g-C3N4 based composites can improve its photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance.