Facile fabrication of 3D interconnected porous boron doped polymeric g-C3N4 with enhanced visible light photocatalytic hydrogen evolution and dye contaminant elimination

Abstract

Researchers have attempted to developing high-efficiency catalysts for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution and organic pollution elimination simultaneously to alleviate the issues of energy shortage and water pollution. In this work, we fabricated 3D interconnected porous boron doped polymeric g-C3N4 catalysts with efficient photocatalytic activity for hydrogen evolution and dye contaminant elimination under visible-light irradiation. The as-fabricated catalysts exhibited significantly enhanced hydrogen evolution (4.37 mmol g −1 h−1) and RhB contaminant elimination (96.37%) activity. Based on characterization and photocatalytic tests, an enhanced mechanism of the superior photocatalytic performance was proposed: 3D interconnected porous structure and B-doping have a synergistic effect on the greatly improved photocatalytic activity. The 3D interconnected structures endowed g-C3N4 with a higher specific surface area and abundant active sites and improved the capacity of rapid absorption to facilitate the photocatalytic process. B doping provided enhanced visible-light absorption capacity and a narrowed bandgap and served as a “highway” for electron-hole pairs to facilitate migration and separation and suppress the combination of photogenerated carriers. Besides, the possible mechanism of enhanced photocatalytic performance was elucidated according to the results of characterization measurements and active species analysis.