Ultrathin porous g-CN nanosheets fabricated by direct calcination of pre-treated melamine for enhanced photocatalytic pe

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Ultrathin porous g-CN nanosheets fabricated by direct calcination of pre-treated melamine for enhanced photocatalytic performance Bangtong Zhu1, Guangqing Xu2,a), Xia Li1, Zhiwei Wang1, Jun Lv2, Xia Shu2, Jun Huang2, Zhixiang Zheng1, Yucheng Wu3,b) 1

School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China; and Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Materials and Devices of Anhui Province, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China 3 School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China; Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Materials and Devices of Anhui Province, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China; and Laboratory of Non-Ferrous Metals and Processing Engineering of Anhui Province, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China a) Address all correspondence to these authors. e-mail: [email protected] b) e-mail: [email protected] 2

Received: 15 May 2019; accepted: 9 September 2019

Graphite nitride carbon nanosheets have received more and more attention toward the photocatalytic research and applications. Ultrathin g-CN nanosheets with porous structure were synthesized successfully by thermal calcination of melamine supramolecular complexes, which was obtained by pre-treating melamine in nitric acid solution at different concentrations (0.5–2 mol/L). Effects of HNO3 pre-treatment on the microstructure of supramolecular complexes were studied. The characteristics of g-CN nanosheets were investigated by X-ray diffractometry, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The degradation performance for RhB and water splitting hydrogen production performance were used to evaluate the photocatalytic performances of g-CN nanosheets. The morphology and microstructure of HNO3/melamine supramolecular complexes are different from those of melamine precursor due to the better arrangement of the melamine units. Ultrathin porous g-CN nanosheets which possess a thickness of less than 2 nm were successfully prepared by calcination of melamine pre-treated with 1.0 mol/L nitric acid. The g-CN(1.0) nanosheets possess the highest photocatalytic degradation performance and water splitting hydrogen production performance due to the effective separation of photogenerated carriers and high specific surface area providing a large number of active sites.

Introduction Environmental damage and energy crisis are becoming more and more serious with the rapid development of economy. Since Fujishima and Honda discovered water photocatalysis on a TiO2 electrode in 1972 [1], solar photocatalytic technology has become an ideal way for solving environmental damage and energy crisis, including organic pollutant degradation, CO2 reduction and water splitting hydrogen generation [2, 3, 4]. In the fields of photocatalytic science and technology, graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN) on