Hydrothermal Synthesis of a Magnesium Vanadate-Functionalized Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanocomposite for an Efficient Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production.

Herein, we reported the fabrication of a magnesium vanadate-reduced graphene oxide (MgVO-rGO) composite. Further, the structural morphology of the as-prepared MgVO-rGO composite was studied by scanning electron microscopy. Powder X-ray diffraction and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy techniques were also adopted to check the phase purity and elemental composition of the prepared MgVO-rGO composite. MgVO-rGO possesses a band gap of 2.98 eV, which prompted us to explore its photocatalytic activity for hydrogen (H) evolution reaction. The MgVO-rGO composite demonstrated the generation of a reasonable amount of H evolution (97.45 μmol g), which is relatively higher than that of pristine MgVO (17.45 μmol g). This may be attributed to the presence of synergism between MgVO and rGO. In addition, MgVO-rGO also showed good stability and suggested its potential application for photocatalytic H evolution applications. So far, no report is available on the use of MgVO-rGO as a photocatalyst for H evolution. We propose the potential role of the MgVO-rGO composite for photocatalytic H evolution applications.