Confining single-atom Pd on g-C3N4 with carbon vacancies towards enhanced photocatalytic NO conversion

By Guimei Liu, Ying Huang, Haiqin Lv, Hui Wang, Yubin Zeng, Mingzhe Yuan, Q. Meng, Chuanyi Wang. 2021

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Modification of a photocatalyst with single-atom noble metals can improve its activity while a remaining challenge is the stabilization of single atoms. As a proof of concept, g-C3N4 with desired amount of carbon defects was fabricated to manipulate the distribution of single-atom Pd by taking advantage of its affinity with carbon vacancy-resulted nitrogen atoms. The single-atom Pd was produced by photo-reduction, preferentially located on the carbon vacancy sites as supported by HAADF-STEM and XAFS analyses. As obtained photocatalyst showed high and stable photocatalytic activity in NO conversion; its activity is about 4.4 times higher than that of the pristine g-C3N4. The improved photoactivity was attributed to the preferential separation and transportation of the photo-generated charge carriers due to the introduction of single-atom Pd as evidenced by UV–vis, static and time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopic analyses. The present work underlines the impetus of surface defect chemistry in the fabrication of single-atom catalysts.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da9d5f4bd28692b1194c9b3b11f428a2c09e8e7a