Face-to-face engineering of ultrathin Pd nanosheets on amorphous carbon nitride for efficient photocatalytic hydrogen production

Photocatalytic hydrogen production represents a promising strategy for clean, sustainable, and environment-friendly energy supply. Up to now, great efforts have been devoted to designing the photocatalysts with noble metal as co-catalyst for visible-light-driven hydrogen evolution, while more efficient photocatalytic systems are still a major challenge. Herein, we report a facile strategy for synthesizing face-to-face ultrathin Pd nanosheets-amorphous carbon nitride (Pd NSs-ACN) structure with large contacting interface and short electronic transmission pathway, which can work as an efficient photocatalyst for hydrogen production. The synthesis starts with the growth of ultrathin Pd NSs, followed by assembly with the visible-light-response ACN through a simple stirring and annealing procedure. The resultant two dimensional face-to-face structures deliver an average hydrogen generation rate of 1.45 mmol h−1 g−1 at a temperature of 25°C, almost 2.6 times higher than that of Pd Nps-ACN with particle-to-face structural feature. The efficient photocatalytic activity is ascribed to the formation of high-density of active sites between ultrafine face-to-face contacted Pd NSs and the ACN, which cooperate more synergistically towards photocatalytic hydrogen production. The face-to-face engineered Pd NSs-ACN hybrids also offer a good stability revealed by photocatalytic hydrogen production measurements. The extraordinary performance highlights a powerful engineering model for designing other face-to-face contacting co-catalyst/photocatalysts, which will be a great impetus to optimize new catalytic transformations.