A strategy of adjusting band alignment to improve photocatalytic degradation and photocatalytic hydrogen evolution of CuSbS2

[Display omitted] •CAS-CdS-ZnO photocatalysts were synthesized by simple rapid microwave irradiation synthesis.•The photocatalytic activity of CAS-CdS-ZnO photocatalyst was investigated.•The effects of adjusting band alignment to photocatalyst were in-depth discussion with characterization and DFT calculation.•A method of adjusting band alignment to reduce interfacial recombination and improve photocatalytic performance was proposed. Photocatalytic technology based on heterojunction structure has been proved to be an effective way to solve environmental pollution and energy crisis. The effective carrier concentration plays an important role in improving the performance of heterojunction photocatalyst. In this work, CuSbS2 (CAS)-CdS-ZnO was prepared by simple 3-steps microwave irradiation method to reveal the influence of energy band structure on photocatalytic performance. Adding CdS could regulate band alignment to translate the “cliff-like” conduction band offset of CAS-ZnO to “spike-like”. That could effectively reduce the carrier recombination rate to improve the photocatalytic degradation activity, which could completely degraded Rhodamine B (RhB) after 80 min under a solar simulation, highest rate constant (0.02028 min−1) and good stability. Furthermore, the transformation of charge transfer mechanism from the Z-type to Ⅱ-type by adding CdS were confirmed by experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. This change could raise the energy level of photoelectrons, resulting in CAS-CdS-ZnO with a certain photocatalytic hydrogen evolution capacity (42.37 μmol g−1 h−1). This work reveals the important role of band structure in photocatalytic properties and applications of heterojunction.