Properties of monoclinic wolframite structure InWO4 for efficient and sustainable photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

This is the first report on the application of InWO4 nanospheres in the field of photocatalysis. Tungstates have excellent thermal and chemical stability; in this work, we have successfully prepared an InWO4/CdS composite catalyst. Since the CB of InWO4 is more negative than that of CdS, InWO4 can act as a cocatalyst to promote the separation and transfer of photogenerated charges, thereby suppressing the recombination of photogenerated electron–hole pairs and significantly improving the performance of the InWO4/CdS composite, and the hydrogen production rate of InWO4/CdS reached 6146.63 μmol g−1 h−1, which was about 4.21 times that of pure CdS. Especially, the InWO4/CdS composite exhibits high photocatalytic stability. In addition, these properties are well characterized by SEM, TEM, XRD, XPS, UV-vis, BET, transient photocurrent and FT-IR analyses etc., and all the results showed good consistency with the hydrogen production experiment.