Recent Advances in Graphitic Carbon Nitride Supported Single‐Atom Catalysts for Energy Conversion

Abstract

AbstractSingle‐atom catalysts are one of the most energetic frontier research fields of catalysis, which exhibit distinctive performance for diverse chemical reactions due to the unique coordination environment, high atomic utilization, high activity and selectivity. Nevertheless, the size decrease of catalyst particles is accompanied with the sharply increased surface energy, thus ultra‐small particles are easy to form aggregation of nanoclusters and cannot maintain the atomic level dispersion. The key factor to protect catalytic sites is to regulate and control the interaction between single atoms and the substrate. As one of the most promising two‐dimensional supports to stabilize the isolated metal atoms, graphitic carbon nitride has been widely studied owing to the existence of abundant pyridine‐like nitrogen atoms for strongly anchoring metal centers and the distinct structure originating from electron rearrangement caused by the interaction between carbon and neighbor nitrogen atoms. In this review, we systematically generalize the controllable syntheses, theoretical calculations, characterizations and applications of graphitic carbon nitride supported isolated single‐atom catalysts, and finally, the prospects and challenges in this emergent field are featured on the basis of current experimental and computational efforts.