Defect Engineering of Porous g-C3N4 to Add Multifunctional Groups for Enhanced Production of H2O2 via Piezo-Photocatalysis

Abstract

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) plays an essential role in many industrial fields and is globally listed as one of the indispensable chemicals. However, synthesizing H2O2 using the anthraquinone oxidation (AO) process requires multiple steps and releases hazardous organic compounds, which could seriously lead to many environmental and human health-related problems. Therefore, an urgent need for manufacturing H2O2 using green and sustainable methods to deal with the mentioned issues has enormously captured scientific interest. In this circumstance, the integration of piezo and photo effects on the generation of H2O2 from water and oxygen with the requirements of using low-cost and efficient catalytic materials is majorly considered. Herein, we report a simple and efficient way to produce H2O2 by employing modified graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) catalysts to achieve the targets. The nanostructured materials were intensively characterized to deeply understand how the catalysts work to produce a significant amount of H2O2, reaching up to 1147.03 μM within 1 h irradiation. The findings showed that the fabrication of novel metal–carbon bonds and other functional groups could be responsible for adding more active sites in the system, promoting the enhancement of catalytic activities. This work would offer scientists a novel outlook to design and develop carbon-based materials for producing fine chemicals from catalysis and other applications.