Phosphorous doped carbon nitride nanobelts for photodegradation of emerging contaminants and hydrogen evolution

Authors/Creators

Shuaijun Wang, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Fengting He
Xiaoli Zhao, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Jinqiang Zhang, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Zhimin Ao
Hong Wu, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Yu Yin, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Lei Shi, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Xinyuan Xu, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Chaocheng Zhao
Shaobin Wang
Hongqi Sun, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow

Abstract

Photocatalysis has demonstrated great potentials for both environmental remediation and green energy production. In this study, a simple solvothermal template-free approach was employed for the first time to synthesize phosphorous doped carbon nitride nanobelt (PCNNB). Advanced characterizations, for instance, ¹³C NMR, ³¹P NMR, and XPS results indicated that P was substitutionally doped at the corner-carbon of the carbon nitride frameworks. The introduction of P dopants inhibited the polymerization between NH₂ groups within PCNNB, enabling the decrease in nanobelt width for the exposure of more active sites. Therefore, the optimized P-CN-NB-2 (derived from 0.2 mM H₃PO₄) rendered enhanced p-hydroxybenzoic acid (HBA) degradation nearly 66-fold higher than bulk g-C₃N₄, among the most efficient g-C₃N₄-based photocatalysts as reported. In addition, the P-CN-NB-1 (derived from 0.02 mM H₃PO₄) exhibited about 2 times higher H₂ evolution rate than CNNB. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were also conducted to provide insights into the mechanism.

Document Type

Journal Article

Funding Information

This work was partially supported by the National Science and Technology Major Project (NO. 2016ZX05040003), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (NO. 17CX06027), ARC Discovery Projects (DP150103026 and DP170104264) and the CSC scholarship (201806450064).

School

School of Engineering

RAS ID

30521

Grant Number

ARC Number : DP150103026, ARC Number : DP170104264

Grant Link

http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP150103026

http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP170104264

Copyright

subscription content

Publisher

Elsevier

Identifier

Lei Shi

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5424-7103

Professor Hongqi Sun

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0907-5626

Comments

Wang, S., He, F., Zhao, X., Zhang, J., Ao, Z., Wu, H., ... Sun, H. (2019). Phosphorous doped carbon nitride nanobelts for photodegradation of emerging contaminants and hydrogen evolution. Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 257.

Original article Available here.