Constructing a novel carbon nitride/polyaniline/ZnO ternary heterostructure with enhanced photocatalytic performance using exfoliated carbon nitride nanosheets as supports

Abstract

Graphitic carbon nitride (CN) is an emerging photocatalyst with promising prospect, but presently it still falls short on photocatalytic efficiency and photoresponsive range. We herein constructed a novel ternary heterostructure by hybridization of conducting polymer and semiconductor with CN. The exfoliated two dimension CN nanosheets (CN-NSs) are superior to bulk CN as both catalysts and supporting materials. Most recently, there are few reports involving the construction of heterojunction photocatalysts using CN-NSs as supports. The improvement of charge separation efficiency, specific surface area and visible light harvesting is simultaneously achieved in such a novel ternary heterostructure due to the synergetic effect of polyaniline (PANI) and ZnO coupling. As a result, the CN-NS/PANI/ZnO photocatalyst possesses excellent visible photocatalytic performance for MB and 4-CP degradation with a rate constant of 0.026 and 0.0049min−1, which is about 3.6 and 3.3 times of CN, respectively. The enhanced mechanism is proposed based on the confirmation of OH and h+ as main oxidative species. Overall, this work can not only yield high-efficient visible photocatalysts but also provide deeper insight into the enhanced mechanisms of CN-NS-based ternary heterostructure.