Excellent visible light absorption by adopting mesoporous SiC in SiC/CdS for enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen generation

The SiC/CdS semiconducting composites have been reported to show excellent synergistic effect for the photocatalytic water splitting to produce H₂ (J. Mater. Chem. A (2014) 2:6296–6300). In this work, the mesoporous SiC prepared via a one-step nanocasting process has been adopted to replace the commercial micro-SiC, to improve the weak light absorption of SiC which suppresses the photocatalytic activity in previous literature. It has been demonstrated that the mesoporous SiC/CdS composite with suitable coverage ratio of SiC (with the molar ratio of SiC:CdS as 1:1) shows stronger light absorption and enhanced charge transfer rate. In consequence, the hydrogen evolution rate reaches 952 μmol · h^–1· g^–1 in the absence of noble metal co-catalyst, which is two times of the micro SiC/CdS system. Our work provides an effective route to enhance the photocatalysis in SiC-based heterojunction materials. This strategy can also be extended in other Z-scheme photocatalytic systems.