Construction of MnO2/Monolayer g-C3N4 with Mn vacancies for Z-scheme overall water splitting

By Zhao Mo, Hui Xu, Zhigang Chen, X. She, Yanhua Song, Jiabiao Lian, Xingwang Zhu, P. Yan, Y. Lei, Shangqin Yuan and 1 more. Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 2019

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Abstract Defect-Engineering is a promising way to introduce metal cation vacancies into target materials, thereby resulting in excellent performance for photocatalytic or electrocatalytic water splitting. Inspired by this, we propose an efficient Z-scheme system comprised of 2D MnO2/Monolayer g-C3N4 with defective Mn3+ active sites to realize overall water splitting. These defective Mn3+ active sites might boost H2O adsorption and optimize the interfacial charge separation/transfer in the photocatalytic process by introducing the Mn3+/Mn4+ redox couple. As a result, the composite displays an excellent and stable H2 and O2 evolution rates of 60.6 and 28.9 μmol g−1 h−1, respectively. Meanwhile, the H2 evolution rate is up to 28.0 mmol g−1 h−1 with apparent quantum efficiency of 23.33% at 420 nm in the H2 evolution half reaction. This study provides a new opportunity for constructing a Z-scheme overall water splitting system by exploiting the redox reactions of other metal cation vacancies.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6d2483715f9923044ffdec303e0369c19ae0f93