Collaborative hydrothermal and calcination fabrication of ZnOS heterostructures for visible-light-driven H production.

Photocatalytic water splitting is forecasted as a promising strategy for H production. In this work, novel zinc oxide/zinc sulfide (ZnOS-) ( = 1, 2, 3 and 4) heterostructures were fabricated by a collaborative hydrothermal and calcination method with different amounts of trithiocyanuric acid. The formation of ZnOS- heterostructures was confirmed by PXRD, XPS, and HRTEM. Moreover, ZnOS-3 nanoparticles exhibited homogeneous and smooth surface morphology structure. ZnOS-3 displayed efficient charge separation and transfer efficiency upon photoinduction. ZnOS-3 showed the highest average H evolution reaction rate (78.87 μmol h) under visible-light irradiation, which increased with increase in the ratio of trithiocyanuric acid in the ZnOS- series. This work provides a new insight to prepare uniformly integrated heterostructures of metal oxides/sulfides for visible-light-driven H generation.