Hydrothermal fabrication of few-layer MoS2 nanosheets within nanopores on TiO2 derived from MIL-125(Ti) for efficient photocatalytic H2 evolution

Protons tend to bond strongly with unsaturated-coordinate S element located at the edge of nano-MoS 2 and are consequently reduced to H 2 . Therefore, increasing the active S atoms quantity will be a feasible approach to enhance hydrogen evolution. Herein we developed a porous TiO 2 derived from metal organic frameworks (MOFs) as scaffold to restrict the growth and inhibit the aggregation of MoS 2 nanosheets. As a result, the thickness of the prepared MoS 2 nanosheets was less than 3   nm (1–4 layers), with more edges and active S atoms being exposed. This few-layer MoS 2 -porous TiO 2 exhibits a H 2 evolution rate of 897.5   μmol   h −1   g −1 , which is nearly twice as much as free-stand MoS 2 nanosheets and twenty times more than physical mixture of MoS 2 with porous TiO 2 . The high performance is attributed to that more active edge sites in few-layer MoS 2 -porous TiO 2 are exposed than pure MoS 2. This work provides a new method to construct MOFs derived porous structures for controlling MoS 2 to expose active sites for HER.