Abstract
There is tremendous effort put in the pursuit for cheap and efficient catalysts for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution systems. Herein, we report an active catalyst that uses the earth-abundant element cobalt and water-dispersible sulfonated graphene. The photocatalytic hydrogen evolution activity of the catalyst was tested by using triethanolamine (TEOA) as electron donor and eosin Y (EY) as the photosensitizer under LED irradiation at 525 nm. Hydrogen was produced constantly even after 20 h, and the turnover number (TON) reached 148 (H2/Co) in 4 h with respect to the initial concentration of the added cobalt salts was shown to be 5.6 times larger than that without graphene.