Oxamide-modified g-C3N4 nanostructures: Tailoring surface topography for high-performance visible light photocatalysis

By Hua Tang, Rui Wang, Cheng-Xiao Zhao, Zupeng Chen, Xiaofei Yang, D. Bukhvalov, Zixia Lin, Qinqin Liu. Chemical Engineering Journal, 2019

234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Pristine graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) suffers from poor photocatalytic activity due to its limited light adsorption, small specific surface area and feasible recombination of photogenerated charge carriers. One practical approach to solve the problem of low solar-to-hydrogen efficiency is nanostructuring the morphology of g-C3N4 to enhance its light-harvesting property and boost the rate of charge-carrier transportation. Here, we present a strategy to optimize the textural properties and catalytic performance of g-C3N4 via using oxamide (OA) as a chemical modifier in the precursor solution, which significantly make the light absorption edge shift from 440 to 650 nm. Moreover, the nanostructure of the resultant g-C3N4 can be easily tuned with increasing the amount of oxamide. The morphological features of g-C3N4 materials change from sheet-like structure to tubular structure, porous nanotube and eventually interconnected porous sheet. More interestingly, the unique g-C3N4 nanostructure offers advantages of a broader solar absorption spectrum and accelerates charge carrier dynamics that are favorable for advancing photocatalytic performance. The findings provide insightful information that can be used to understand the structure-property relationship in g-C3N4 nanostructures for improved solar-to-fuel conversion.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c8d52204fe050349e58b9cc1ddc257711c088bd