Development of organic CdS/spinacia oleracea based photocatalyst for bioconversion and remarkable production of hydrogen

Abstract

Photocatalytic Hydrogen generation from Biomass is an emerging approach to produce renewable Hydrogen. The objective of this study is to produce green hydrogen from biomass with the help of full band solar irradiation which can be used as fuel and can substitute the fossil fuels in the coming days. Here, a biomass based photocatalyst has been synthesised, characterized and evaluated for the Hydrogen generation using a full band solar spectrum. The Hybrid photocatalyst CdS/Spinacia Oleracea has been tested for hydrogen generation via photocatalytic water splitting under full band solar irradiation. The Spinacia Oleracea is known for its high amount of chlorophyll, which act as photosensitizer in the hybrid photocatalyst. The synthesised photocatalyst were characterised using different morphological and optical tools like FE-SEM, EDX, XRD, TEM, UV-Vis and PL spectroscopy. The synthesised photocatalyst (CdS/Spinacia Oleracea) has been shown higher hydrogen generation than the pristine CdS photocatalyst. It has been shown that the activity of synthesised photocatalyst has been increased nearly six times than the pristine photocatalyst. The solar full band irradiation activity of the CdS/Spinacia Oleracea photocatalyst is measured to be 29.80 mmol g-1 h-1, which is higher than the activity of pristine CdS, which is 4.59 mmol g-1 h-1. The Apparent quantum efficiency of CdS/Spinacia Oleracea is 18.21% at 420 nm and 15.63% at 350 nm of Band Pass Filter using solar simulator. A proposed mechanism has been also forwarded showing improved electron-hole separation and low charge recombination. These type of low cost photocatalyst having high green Hydrogen generation performance result to industrial and scale up applications.