Fabrication of well-dispersed Pt nanoparticles onto the donor-acceptor type conjugated polymers for high-efficient photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

It is still challenging to fabricate photocatalysts via loaded metal cocatalysts with good dispersion onto the conjugated polymers (CPs). Herein, a donor-acceptor (D–A) structural CP of PyDTDO-3 was employed to host platinum (Pt) nanoparticles (NPs) using N , N ′-dimethylformamide (DMF) as a protectant, stabilizer, and reducing agent, which not only promotes Pt NPs to have excellent dispersion property on the surface of PyDTDO-3 but also endows Pt NPs to maintain metallic Pt 0 species. As a result, the PyDTDO-3 loaded with Pt NPs exhibits remarkable hydrogen (H 2 ) evolution activity with a rate of 39.9 mmol g −1 h −1 under visible light irradiation, and the fair stability of optimal 7% Pt/PyDTDO-3 is expressed in the rate of H 2 generation upon 30 h cycling. Based on density functional theory (DFT) calculations, it has been demonstrated that Pt NPs are selectively loaded onto the acceptor (A) unit of PyDTDO-3 that has the lowest adsorption energies ( E ads ) and the closest bond lengths between the Pt NPs and PyDTDO-3. Moreover, there are much more electrons filling at the Fermi level ( E f ), indicating the optimal 7% Pt/PyDTDO-3 with high electroconductivity timely captured and removed the photoinduced electrons and thus realized the space separation efficiency of electron-hole pairs. Overall, our findings offer a rational way to load metal cocatalysts onto CPs with good dispersion for efficient photocatalytic H 2 evolution.