Synthesis of nanoporous carbon nitride using calcium carbonate as templates with enhanced visible-light photocatalytic activity

Abstract

A commercial calcium carbonate particle as hard template is employed to synthesize mesoporous carbon nitride (mpg-C3N4) by a thermal polycondensation process using dicyandiamide as a precursor, then it can be easily removed using diluted hydrochloric acid. Compare with the other hard templates, such as SiO2 and porous anodic aluminium oxides (Al2O3), the industrially available calcium carbonate particles are not only low-cost, but also environment friendly. A certain amount of carbon dopants were generated in the resulting mpg-C3N4 matrix, and the concentration of carbon dopants can be controlled by the amount of calcium carbonate particle. The synthesized mpg-C3N4 not only possesses high specific surface area, but also has the enhanced visible light absorption range from 460nm to 800nm. The photocatalytic activity increases as the mass ratio of template to dicyandiamide increases, when the mass ratio is 1.0, the photocatalytic performance is up to the maximum, which is 12.3 times higher than that of bulk g-C3N4. The enhancement of the photocatalytic performance of mpg-C3N4 is contributed to its improved specific surface areas and the enhancement of the visible light absorptions from 450nm to 800nm.