Engineering oxygen-containing and amino groups into two-dimensional atomically-thin porous polymeric carbon nitrogen for enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen production

By Nannan Meng, Jian Ren, Yang Liu, Yi Huang, T. Petit, Bin Zhang. 2018

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Polymeric carbon nitride (PCN) is a promising earth-abundant photocatalyst for solar energy conversion. However, the photocatalytic activities of PCN-based materials remain moderate because of their poor dispersion in water and their fast electron–hole recombination. Here, a facile two-step continuous thermal treatment strategy is presented to endow the bulk PCN nanosheets with an atomically-thin structure, strong hydrophilicity and Lewis basicity to dramatically enhance the photocatalytic hydrogen (H2) generation performance. The formation of the oxygen-containing and amino groups in the atomically-thin PCN sheets improves the charge separation and provides rich active sites for the surface reaction. Such synergistic effects lead to a superior visible-light-driven photocatalytic activity and its H2 evolution rate (1233.5 μmol h−1 g−1) is more than 11 times higher than the bulk PCN using Ni as a cocatalyst. Additionally, the H2 evolution rate can reach 20948.6 μmol h−1 g−1 using Pt as a cocatalyst under AM1.5G solar irradiation.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb1a6390179ab401637054124e5fb29aaa7caffe