Hydrothermal Synthesis of a Magnesium Vanadate-Functionalized Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanocomposite for an Efficient Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production.

Herein, we reported the fabrication of a magnesium vanadate-reduced graphene oxide (Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO) composite. Further, the structural morphology of the as-prepared Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO composite was studied by scanning electron microscopy. Powder X-ray diffraction and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy techniques were also adopted to check the phase purity and elemental composition of the prepared Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO composite. Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO possesses a band gap of 2.98 eV, which prompted us to explore its photocatalytic activity for hydrogen (H 2 ) evolution reaction. The Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO composite demonstrated the generation of a reasonable amount of H 2 evolution (97.45 μmol g -1 ), which is relatively higher than that of pristine Mg 3 V 2 O 8 (17.45 μmol g -1 ). This may be attributed to the presence of synergism between Mg 3 V 2 O 8 and rGO. In addition, Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO also showed good stability and suggested its potential application for photocatalytic H 2 evolution applications. So far, no report is available on the use of Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO as a photocatalyst for H 2 evolution. We propose the potential role of the Mg 3 V 2 O 8 -rGO composite for photocatalytic H 2 evolution applications.