Hydrothermal fabrication of few-layer MoS2 nanosheets within nanopores on TiO2 derived from MIL-125(Ti) for efficient photocatalytic H2 evolution

Protons tend to bond strongly with unsaturated-coordinate S element located at the edge of nano-MoS2 and are consequently reduced to H-2. Therefore, increasing the active S atoms quantity will be a feasible approach to enhance hydrogen evolution. Herein we developed a porous TiO2 derived from metal organic frameworks (MOFs) as scaffold to restrict the growth and inhibit the aggregation of MoS(2 )nanosheets. As a result, the thickness of the prepared MoS(2 )nanosheets was less than 3 nm (1-4 layers), with more edges and active S atoms being exposed. This few-layer MoS2-porous TiO2 exhibits a H-2 evolution rate of 897.5 1 mu mol h(-1) g(-1), which is nearly twice as much as free-stand MoS(2 )nanosheets and twenty times more than physical mixture of MoS(2 )with porous TiO2. The high performance is attributed to that more active edge sites in few-layer MoS2-porous TiO(2 )are exposed than pure MoS2. This work provides a new method to construct MOFs derived porous structures for controlling MoS2 to expose active sites for HER. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.