Nitrogen doped carbon ribbons modified g-C3N4 for markedly enhanced photocatalytic H2-production in visible to near-infrared region

By Huinan Che, Guangbo Che, Pengjie Zhou, Chunbo Liu, Hongjun Dong, Chunxue Li, Ning Song, Chunmei Li. 2020

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Designing carbonaceous materials modified g-C3N4-based photocatalytic system with broadband solar absorption from the visible to near-infrared (NIR) region for photocatalytic H2 evolution (PHE) remains a big challenge. Herein, urea formaldehyde resin-carbonized nitrogen doped carbon (UFR-NC) ribbons modified g-C3N4 nanosheets were prepared by a facile thermal treatment method. Experimental results imply that g-C3N4/UFR-NC composites not only show larger specific surface area (SSA), better crystallinity and outstanding stability but also exhibit faster separation of charge carriers, in which the UFR-NC ribbons are more apt to accept electrons. Additionally, g-C3N4/UFR-NC composites possess superior optical adsorption from visible to NIR light and the band gap can be easily adjusted by changing the content of UFR-NC ribbons. Surprisingly, g-C3N4/UFR-NC0.02 exhibits the highest PHE activity (84.32 µmol h−1), which is over 54.75 and 6.51 times higher than that of the g-C3N4 obtained by direct calcination of melamine (g-C3N4-M) and direct calcination of urea (g-C3N4-U) under visible light, and the apparent quantum efficiency (AQE) reaches 6.2% at 420 nm. In addition, the g-C3N4/UFR-NC0.02 displays an enhanced PHE activity of 26.59 µmol h−1 and 0.45 µmol h−1 under the blue visible (λ = 475 nm) and NIR light irradiation (λ > 800 nm). And the PHE activity of g-C3N4/UFR-NC0.02 has no obvious change after fourteen runs within 70 h. Our results suggest that constructing carbonaceous materials modified g-C3N4-based photocatalytic system will be a promising strategy to PHE.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1eaae12847d1706c3c1af5e357bcf05d3e85a06f