Congratulations to Jiangnan Huang! Her work entitled evealing active-site structure of porous nitrogen-defected carbon nitride for highly effective photocatalytic hydrogen evolution is published in Chemical Engineering Journal.

Abstract:

The deficient carbon nitride (g-C3N4) displays not only an improved visible light absorption, but also an enhanced photocurrent and restricted electron-hole pair recombination. In this work, nitric acid was used to engineer the defects in g-C3N4, which simultaneously possessed fibrous and layered structures. The modified g-C3N4 (CNx) was utilized as photocatalyst for the effective photocatalytic H2 evolution. As high as 1160 μmol/h/g H2 production rate (λ > 400 nm) was achieved over CN3, 19 times higher than that of pristine g-C3N4 (CN0, 60 μmol/h/g). The apparent quantum efficiencies (AQE) of CN3 at 405 and 420 nm were 7.83% and 7.67%, respectively. The mechanism study showed that the surface functionality and the N defects impacted the catalytic efficiency significantly. The OC, NHx species and N defects at N2C site acted as the active sites for the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution, while the OH group displayed the negative effect in this process. To the best of our knowledge, the active-site structure diagram of the nitrogen-defected CNx for photocatalysis was shown systematically. Additionally, this nitrogen-defected CNx demonstrated a high stability for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution.

Citation:

Jiangnan Huang, Yonghai Cao,* Hongjuan Wang, Hao Yu, Feng Peng* HanboZou, Zili Liu. Revealing active-site structure of porous nitrogen-defected carbon nitride for highly effective photocatalytic hydrogen evolution.Chemical Engineering Journl, 2019, 373, 687-699. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2019.05.088