Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution is a promising “green chemistry” route driven by sunlight for the direct water splitting into value-added hydrogen energy. Herein, with the object of exploring the effect of CuO loading on W18O49 photocatalytic activity, a 3D Urchin-like CuO modified W18O49 (CuO/W18O49) microspheres with different CuO loadings were synthesized via thermochemical precipitation combined with solvent-thermal method. The obtained CuO/W18O49 microspheres were analyzed by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), transmission electron microscope (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and photoluminescence (PL), etc. The results infer that the urchin-like 3D morphology with a high surface area and abundant 1D nanowires promotes electron transfer, the introduction of CuO further increases the number of active sites, thereby ensuring fast interfacial charge transfer to improve photocatalytic performance. During photocatalytic H2 evolution from water splitting, 5 wt.% CuO/W18O49 shows the optimal performance, the H2 yield is almost 3.22 times that of the undoped counterparts. This work presents that oxygen-vacancy-rich heterojunction nanocomposites can be used as a new strategy to design materials with high photocatalytic activity.

中文翻译：

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3D Urchin-like CuO修饰的W18O49纳米结构在可见光照射下促进光催化氢的释放

光催化氢的释放是一种有前途的“绿色化学”路线，受阳光驱动，直接将水分解成增值的氢能。在此，以探索CuO负载量对W18O49的光催化活性的影响为目的，通过热化学沉淀结合溶剂-热法合成了具有不同CuO负载量的3D Urchin样CuO修饰的W18O49（CuO / W18O49）微球。通过X射线衍射（XRD），扫描电子显微镜（SEM），能量色散X射线光谱（EDS），透射电子显微镜（TEM），X射线光电子能谱（ XPS）和光致发光（PL）等。结果表明，具有高表面积和丰富一维纳米线的类似海胆的3D形态可促进电子转移，CuO的引入进一步增加了活性位点的数量，从而确保了快速的界面电荷转移，从而提高了光催化性能。在水分解产生的光催化H2期间，5％的CuO / W18O49表现出最佳性能，其H2收率几乎是未掺杂H2收率的3.22倍。这项工作表明，富氧空位的异质结纳米复合材料可以用作设计具有高光催化活性的材料的新策略。