Bifunctional synergistic CoP/Coral-like g-C3N4 catalyst: Boosting the photocatalytic water splitting hydrogen evolution and appreciation of anisalcohol at same time

g-C3N4 is an outstanding photocatalytic hydrogen generation material, yet suffers from the low efficiency of carrier separation and high cost of sacrificial agents as well as noble metal cocatalyst. Herein, we report a bifunctional synergistic CoP/coral-like g-C3N4 heterojunction (CoP/CorCN), which exhibited superior watersplitting hydrogen evolution activity by replacing a sacrificial reagent with anisalcohol conversion to produce value-added anisaldehyde. Compared with traditional g-C3N4, the novel CorCN exhibited increased N3C vacancies, widened interlayer distance, extended photoresponse range, as well as increased specific surface area. Theoretical calculation results show that the introduced N3C vacancy enable carbon nitride nanosheets curl into a tube to expose more anisalcohol adsorption sites. Further, the combination of CoP with CorCN dramatically improved the charge transfer kinetics, hence, CoP/CorCN presented an impressive hydrogen evolution rate of 353 μmol∙g−1∙h−1, which is much more higher than that of pristine CorCN, CoP as well as CoP/bulk-CN. In addition, in-situ diffuse infrared spectroscopy, mass spectra and gas chromatography (in-situ FT-IR, MS and GC) were conducted to verify the formation of value-added anisaldehyde and no excessive oxidation products such as acids and CO2 were produced. These findings present here should be highly useful for promoting the research and development of efficient bifunctional synergistic photocatalyst.