A bubble-assisted strategy to prepare porous ultrathin carbon nitride for highly-active photocatalytic hydrogen production

Abstract

Porous and ultrathin polymetric carbon nitride has recently emerged as a promising photocatalyst. However, the complex synthesis strategy of porous ultrathin carbon nitride (PTCN) impedes its further application in photocatalytic water splitting. It is a challenge to find a facile and powerful synthesis strategy of porous ultrathin polymetric carbon nitride. In this work, we demonstrate a bubble-assisted strategy for porous ultrathin polymetric carbon nitride. The thermal polymerization process under the blowing effect of NH4Cl endows PTCN with the porous and ultrathin structure. The larger accessible specific surface area (SSA) provides abundant active edges and sites, decreasing the diffusion distance of reactants and carriers. Compared to the bulk carbon nitride (bulk CN), PTCN possesses higher SSA, a broader bandgap, and improved photogenerated carriers transfer efficiency. In addition, the calculation of Gibbs free energy manifests the improved hydrogen absorption ability. As a result, a remarkable hydrogen evolution rate at 22.0 mmol h−1 g−1 is achieved, which is 6 times higher than that of bulk carbon nitride.