Abstract
Environmental remediation based on semiconducting materials offers a green solution for pollution control in water. Herein, we report a novel graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) by one-step polycondensation of urea. The novel g-C3N4 material with a surface area of 114 m2 g−1 allowed the repetitive adsorption of the rhodamine B (RhB) dye and facilitated its complete photocatalytic degradation upon light irradiation in 20 min. This study provides new insights into the fabrication of g-C3N4-based materials and facilitates their potential application in the synergistic removal of harmful organic pollutants in the field of water purification.
Highlights
The problems of environmental pollution have invigorated growing awareness all over the world.[1,2] To date, a number of treatments, such as biodegradation,[3] adsorption,[4] and photocatalytic degradation,[5] have been studied to remove organic pollutants in water
Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) has been considered as the generation photocatalyst and a step towards achieving sustainability for arti cial photosynthesis and environmental remediation since the pioneering work has been reported in 2009.11–16 As a metal-free polymeric photocatalyst, g-C3N4 exhibits a number of excellent characteristics, such as facile synthesis, high chemical and thermal stability, reasonable cost, abundant and inexpensive building elements, appropriate electronic band structure for visible-light response, and exible supermolecular networks for ne-tuning material properties, for photocatalysis.[13,17]
The two sharp peaks become very weak in the U-N pattern, which demonstrate the absence of long-range order in the atomic arrangements.[40,41]
Summary
The problems of environmental pollution have invigorated growing awareness all over the world.[1,2] To date, a number of treatments, such as biodegradation,[3] adsorption,[4] and photocatalytic degradation,[5] have been studied to remove organic pollutants in water. Photocatalysis based on the conversion of solar into chemical energy has been regarded to be one of the most promising technologies to remove environmental pollutants.[5,6] Ever since the photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants in aqueous suspensions has been reported by Carey et al in 1976,7 there has been substantial development in the fabrication of highly efficient semiconductor-based photocatalysts.[8,9,10] Recently, graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) has been considered as the generation photocatalyst and a step towards achieving sustainability for arti cial photosynthesis and environmental remediation since the pioneering work has been reported in 2009.11–16 As a metal-free polymeric photocatalyst, g-C3N4 exhibits a number of excellent characteristics, such as facile synthesis, high chemical and thermal stability, reasonable cost, abundant and inexpensive building elements, appropriate electronic band structure for visible-light response, and exible supermolecular networks for ne-tuning material properties, for photocatalysis.[13,17] the practical applications of g-C3N4 are still hindered by the several obstacles and shortcomings, especially its low speci c surface area, limited active sites, poor adsorption ability, and the serious aggregation observed during a photocatalytic process, of common bulk. Our study provides new insights into the fabrication of g-C3N4-based materials and facilitates their potential application for the synergistic removal of various organic pollutants in the eld of water puri cation
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