Nitrogen-doped carbon dots decorated on g-C3N4/Ag3PO4 photocatalyst with improved visible light photocatalytic activity and mechanism insight

By Xuli Miao, Xiao‐Yang Yue, Zhenyuan Ji, Xiaoping Shen, Hu Zhou, Miaomiao Liu, Keqiang Xu, Jun Zhu, Guoxing Zhu, Lirong Kong and 1 more. Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 2018

278 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In this work, an all solid Z-scheme g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/NCDs photocatalyst has been prepared through decorating the direct Z-scheme g-C3N4/Ag3PO4 photocatalyst with nitrogen-doped carbon dots (NCDs). The g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/NCDs photocatalyst exhibits excellent photocatalytic activity for the degradation of methylene blue (MB), rhodamine B (RhB) and phenol under visible light irradiation. The solutions of MB (10 mg L−1) and RhB (10 mg L−1) can be efficiently degraded within 20 min and 15 min, respectively, and the phenol (50 mg L−1) can be degraded to 36% within 80 min, which are much better than those of Ag3PO4 and g-C3N4/Ag3PO4, indicating that the introduction of NCDs into g-C3N4/Ag3PO4 can effectively improve the photocatalytic activity. Moreover, the photocatalytic performance of g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/NCDs shows just a slight decrease after four degradation cycles, indicating a high stability of the g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/NCDs photocatalyst. A possible photocatalytic mechanism based on the experimental results is proposed. It is revealed that NCDs on the ternary g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/NCDs can enhance the light harvesting capacity and molecular oxygen activation ability of the photocatalyst, and serve as excellent electronic transmission medium to promote the transfer and separation of photo-generated electron-hole pairs. This study demonstrates that NCDs decorated photocatalysts are very promising for environment and related applications.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5527cfbf8c9575fcd122de4513663ca7a969faaa