Visible light-driven efficient photocatalytic hydrogen production using nickel-doped molybdenum disulfide (Ni@MoS₂) nanoflowers

In the recent years, molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) has been widely used in various optical applications. MoS₂ has decent optical band gap and can be used as photocatalyst for hydrogen production applications. In this paper, we reported the synthesis of flower-like nickel (Ni)-doped MoS₂. The as-prepared Ni@MoS₂ has optical band gap of 1.71 eV which was lower than that of the pristine MoS₂ (1.90 eV). Thus, Ni@MoS₂ was further used as photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution. The effect of different dose (5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 mg) of the photocatalyst (Ni@MoS₂) was also examined. The photocatalytic investigations exhibited the generation of good hydrogen production amount (2021.5 µmol g⁻¹) with reasonable hydrogen generation rate of 404.3 µmol g⁻¹ h⁻¹ using 25 mg Ni@MoS₂. These findings suggested that doping may significantly improve the photocatalytic hydrogen production. The proposed Ni@MoS₂ also presented good stability and reusability for hydrogen production.