Highly Efficient Photocatalytic H2 Evolution from Water using Visible Light and Structure-Controlled Graphitic Carbon Nitride

By D. Martin, K. Qiu, S. Shevlin, A. Handoko, Xiaowei Chen, Zhengxiao Guo, Junwang Tang. Angewandte Chemie (International Ed. in English), 2014

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The major challenge of photocatalytic water splitting, the prototypical reaction for the direct production of hydrogen by using solar energy, is to develop low-cost yet highly efficient and stable semiconductor photocatalysts. Herein, an effective strategy for synthesizing extremely active graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) from a low-cost precursor, urea, is reported. The g-C3N4 exhibits an extraordinary hydrogen-evolution rate (ca. 20 000 μmol h−1 g−1 under full arc), which leads to a high turnover number (TON) of over 641 after 6 h. The reaction proceeds for more than 30 h without activity loss and results in an internal quantum yield of 26.5 % under visible light, which is nearly an order of magnitude higher than that observed for any other existing g-C3N4 photocatalysts. Furthermore, it was found by experimental analysis and DFT calculations that as the degree of polymerization increases and the proton concentration decreases, the hydrogen-evolution rate is significantly enhanced.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b3ae9ce69b55155e1f315c2094b967c73364477

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Chuangang Hu
2. Yongfa Zhu
3. Bettina V. Lotsch
4. L. Qu
5. Fei Zhao
6. J. Xiong
7. L. Dai

In Materials Chemistry

1. V. W. Lau
2. V. Vyas
3. Chuangang Hu
4. Yongfa Zhu
5. Bettina V. Lotsch
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In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. V. Vyas
2. Chuangang Hu
3. V. W. Lau
4. Fei Zhao
5. Yongfa Zhu
6. Bettina V. Lotsch
7. Nan Chen
8. Qing Han

Citations in the corpus

• Soft Photocatalysis: Organic Polymers for Solar Fuel Production (2016, background): “55, 56 More recently, an increasing trend towards replacement of noble metal co-catalysts with homogeneous and bioinspired systems is noticeable, which is driven by the need to better understand the photocatalytic mechanism, and to reduce the overall cost of the system,(57-60) In fact, quantum effic”