Abstract
Polymeric carbon nitride is a fascinating visible-light-response metal-free semiconductor photocatalyst in recent decades. Nevertheless, the photocatalytic H2 efficiency is unsatisfactory due to the insufficient visible-light harvesting capacity and low quantum yields caused by the bulky structure seriously limited its applications. To overcome these defects, in this research, a 3D hierarchical pancake-like porous carbon nitride (PPCN) was successfully fabricated by a facile bottom-up method. The as-prepared photocatalyst exhibit enlarged surface area, enriched reactive sites, improved charge carrier transformation and separation efficiency, and expanded bandgap with a more negative conduction band towardan enhanced reduction ability. All these features synergistically enhanced the photocatalytic H2 evolution efficiency of 3% Pt@PPCN (430 µmol g−1 h−1) under the visible light illumination (λ ≥ 420 nm), which was nine-fold higher than that of 3% Pt@bulk C3N4 (BCN) (45 µmol g−1 h−1). The improved structure and enhanced photoelectric properties were systematically investigated by different characterization techniques. This research may provide an insightful synthesis strategy for polymeric carbon nitride with excellent light-harvesting capacity and enhanced separation of charges toward remarkable photocatalytic H2 for water splitting.
Highlights
With fossil fuel reserves dwindling every day, energy shortage and environmental pollution issues have become increasingly prominent
While the pancake-like porous carbon nitride (PPCN) presented a higher quantum efficiency of ~19%.In this work, we report a low-cost and a low-cost andbottom-up straightforward bottom-up method for the production of hierarchical straightforward method for the production of hierarchical pancake-like porouspancake-like carbon nitride, porous nitride, the typical synthesis procedure is presented in Scheme
The morphologies of bulk carbon nitride (BCN) and PPCN were investigated via SEM and TEM
Summary
With fossil fuel reserves dwindling every day, energy shortage and environmental pollution issues have become increasingly prominent. The photocatalytic performance of bulky CN was severely limited, resulting from the small specific surface area, large recombination rates of photo-excited electron-hole pairs, weak light-harvesting capacity, and inadequate catalytic active sites [23,24,25,26,27,28]. To address these shortcomings, many strategies have been developed, such as heteroatom.
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