Zinc-Deficiency Induced g-C 3 N 4 Nanosheets: Photocatalytic Nitrogen Fixation Study and Carrier Dynamics
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Zinc‑Deficiency Induced g‑C3N4 Nanosheets: Photocatalytic Nitrogen Fixation Study and Carrier Dynamics Yafang Qi1 · Yifan Chen4 · Rui Wang1 · Lijing Wang2,3 · Fuli Zhang2 · Qi Shen3 · Peng Qu2,5 · Daosheng Liu1 Received: 17 August 2020 / Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract g-C3N4 has great application prospect in the field of photocatalytic nitrogen fixation owing to the advantages of abundant raw materials, low toxicity, low consumption, high efficiency and stability. However, the low surface-active site and high carrier recombination rate limit their nitrogen fixation activities. Defect regulation is one of the effective methods to improve photocatalytic nitrogen fixation activity. In this paper, g-C3N4 nanosheets are successfully modified by ZnS containing zinc vacancy, which enhanced the carrier transport capacity and active site of g-C3N4 for photocatalytic nitrogen fixation. Thus, without any sacrificial agent, an optimized nitrogen fixation activity of 2.1 µmol·h−1 (105 µmol·h−1·g−1) is achieved with the irradiation of visible light, which presents obvious advantages among the latest reported g-C3N4 related photocatalysts. The morphology, structure and photocatalytic carrier dynamics of the photocatalyst are studied by a series of experimental characterizations. Graphic Abstract
Keywords Zinc vacancy · g-C3N4 nanosheets · Photocatalytic nitrogen fixation
Yafang Qi and Yifan Chen have contributed equally to this work. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10562-020-03415-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Extended author information available on the last page of the article
1 Introduction As we all know, nitrogen is one of the indispensable elements for the growth of crops. Although nitrogen content in the air is up to 78 percent, few crops like legumes that can use rhizobia for biological nitrogen fixation, and artificial nitrogen fixation
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techniques have been developed gradually to solve the problem of increasing grain yield [1–4]. Among many photocatalytic materials, g-C3N4 has attracted much attention in photocatalytic nitrogen fixation due to its advantages of abundant raw materials, low toxicity, low consumption and high stability [5–7]. However, at present, the further development of g-C3N4 in nitrogen fixation is still limited by low specific surface area and high carrier recombination rate [8–12]. Proper introduction of defect level is an effective way to improve the active site of nitrogen fixation reaction, and the surface modification of the catalyst by small size nanocrystalline can be a good choice to improve the surface area and carrier separation capacity of photocatalyst [13–18]. For example, Xue et al. designed porous g-C3N4 with nitrogen defects and cyanogroup by alkali assisted urea heat treatment method, which improved the utilization rate of sunlight and increased the surface reactivity
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