Enhancing Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production of g-C3N4 by Selective Deposition of Pt Cocatalyst.

Yang Li,Junying Zhang,Xiaofang Jia,Zhaoyu Ma,Yue Lu,Lianqing Dong

doi:10.3390/nano11123266

Abstract

Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) has been widely studied as a photocatalyst for the splitting of water to produce hydrogen. In order to solve the problems of limited number of active sites and serious recombination rate of charge-carriers, noble metals are needed as cocatalysts. Here, we selectively anchored Pt nanoparticles (NPs) to specific nitrogen species on the surface of g-C3N4 via heat treatment in argon–hydrogen gas mixture, thus achieving g-C3N4 photocatalyst anchored by highly dispersed homogeneous Pt NPs with the co-existed metallic Pt0 and Pt2+ species. The synergistic effect of highly dispersed metallic Pt0 and Pt2+ species makes the catalyst exhibit excellent photocatalytic performance. Under the full-spectrum solar light irradiation, the photocatalytic hydrogen production rate of the photocatalyst is up to 18.67 mmol·g−1·h−1, which is 5.1 times of the catalyst prepared by non-selective deposition of Pt NPs.

Highlights

IntroductionNanomaterials 2021, 11, With the development of world economy and the increase of population, the demand for energy is increasing continually [1,2]
Pure g-C3 N4 shows two characteristic peaks located at around 13.2◦ and 27.4◦, which are attributed to the in-plane ordering of tri-s-triazine units (indexed as (100)) and the interlayer stacking of conjugated aromatic systems (indexed as (002)), respectively [34]
Pure g-C3N4 shows two characteristic peaks located at around 13.2° and 27.4°, which are attributed to the in-plane ordering of tri-striazine units (indexed as (100)) and the interlayer stacking of conjugated aromatic systems (indexed as (002)), respectively [34]

Summary

Introduction

Nanomaterials 2021, 11, With the development of world economy and the increase of population, the demand for energy is increasing continually [1,2]. In order to reduce the dependence on non-renewable energy, it is very important to develop environmentally friendly alternative energy. Since investigating on the semiconductor photocatalyst have been carried out extensively [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Among the photocatalytic semiconductors studied, g-C3 N4 has been considered as an ideal photocatalyst with moderate band gap (2.7 eV) and stable physical and chemical properties [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]

Methods

Results

Conclusion