Recent Advances on g‐C₃N₄ Based Photocatalysts for Typical Antibiotics Photodegradation: Preparation, Mechanism and Influencing Factors

Abstract

Antibiotics cause negative impacts on the ecosystem and people‘s health, and it is imperative to reduce antibiotic residuum in a green and sustainable way. There has been a broad application of photocatalytic technology in the sewage treatment field. Compared with metal oxides, graphite carbon nitride, as an n‐type non‐metallic semiconducting polymer, has an applicable energy gap, simple preparation and easily accessible. Yet the g‐C3N4 of simple preparation tends to have some crucial weaknesses like rapid charge carrier recombination, underutilization of the visible spectrum and incomplete mineralization, which severely confine its farther application. Element doping modification enormously improves the separation of g‐C3N4 photogenic hole‐charge, which is applied to the removal of antibiotics in wastewater. The doping modification of g‐C3N4‐based semiconductor photocatalysts and research progress in the photocatalytic degradation of various antibiotics (sulfonamides, β‐lactam, quinolones, tetracycline) in water are reviewed in this paper, and the preparation of g‐C3N4, the sorts and principles of elemental doping are investigated, with emphasis on the application of g‐C3N4 towards the photocatalytic degradation of antibiotics, and the existing problems and challenges in this field are put forward.