Ni-MOF-74 derived nickel phosphide and In2O3 form S-scheme heterojunction for efficient hydrogen evolution

S-scheme heterojunction is a new photocatalytic hydrogen production system, which can effectively eliminate useless electron-hole pairs and improve the efficiency of photocatalytic hydrogen production. In this work, Ni-MOF-P(Ni2P)/In2O3 composite photocatalyst was prepared with Ni-MOF-74 and In2O3 by a one-step calcination-phosphating method. The prepared composite catalyst maintained a specific parallelogram-layered structure of Ni-MOF-74 and constructed S-scheme heterojunction. Various characterization techniques such as XRD, SEM, and XPS were used for the characterization of the photocatalyst, which proved that the Ni-MOF-P/In2O3 composite photocatalyst was successfully synthesized for the photocatalytic performance. SEM study showed that In2O3 was excellently compounded on Ni2P, and the cycling experiments and XRD of the sample after the cycling experiment proved their outstanding stability. The amount of hydrogen evolution with a mass ratio of Ni2P and In2O3 of 1 : 0.3 was 494.17 mu mol (within 5 h), which is 3 times the hydrogen evolution of Ni-MOF-P. In this work, a novel and simple method for preparing non-noble metal phosphides was proposed for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution using a photocatalyst.