Carbon rod of zinc-carbon primary battery waste as a substrate for CdS and TiO2 photocatalyst layer for visible light driven photocatalytic hydrogen production

In this research, carbon rod as a solid waste of primary Zinc-Carbon batteries was used as a substrate for CdS and TiO2 film. The film was deposited by chemical bath deposition with surfactant molecules as linker agent to promote the connection between the semiconductor film and the substrate. Material characterization was conducted to understand the phases content, its surface morphology, the quantum yield (QY) as measured through isopropanol degradation, and then their activity as a photocatalyst for visible light driven photocatalytic hydrogen production. XRD analysis found that the carbon rod waste is a mechanical mixture of amorphous carbon, represented by width broad peak lying between 22 and 25° and graphitic carbon, represented by a strong (002) peak at 26.3° and also a (001) peak at 42.2°. The result shows that CdS/Carbon (CdS/C) has higher photocatalytic activity than the TiO2/Carbon (TiO2/C) with the quantum yield value at 380 nm of a photon is 1.651 × 10−3. Meanwhile, TiO2/C provide the value of 1.495 × 10−4. The QY value of CdS/C also higher than TiO2/C at 450 nm of the light source. The H2 production which was conducted with CdS/C performs 1.67 times higher than the production with TiO2/C as a photocatalyst, i.e., 0.369 μmol s−1 g−1. Meanwhile, the H2 production rate with TiO2/C is 0.222 μmol s−1 g−1.