Tailoring the Mesoporous Texture of Graphitic Carbon Nitride

Abstract

Recently, graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) materials have received a great attention from many researchers due to their various roles as a visible light harvesting photocatalyst, metal-free catalyst, reactive template, nitrogen source of nitridation reaction, etc. g-C3N4 could be prepared by temperature-induced polymerization of cyanamide or melamine. In this study, we report a preparation of mesoporous graphitic carbon nitrides with tailored porous texture including pore size, and specific surface area from cyanamide and colloidal silica nanoparticles (Ludox). At first, cyanamide-silica nanocomposites were prepared by mixing colloidal silica with different size in the range of 7-22 nm and cyanamide, followed by evaporating the solvent in the resulting mixture. Mesoporous g-C3N4 samples were prepared by calcining cyanamide-silica nanocomposite at 550 degrees C for 4 hrs and removing the silica nanoparticles by using ammonium hydrogen fluoride. The formation of g-C3N4 was confirmed by the sharp (002) peak (d = 3.25 A) of graphitic interlayer stacking, and the broad (100) peak (d = 6.86 A) of in-plane repeating unit in the X-ray diffraction patterns. According to N2 adsorption-desorption analysis, the pore size of mesoporous carbon nitrides was similar to the size of colloidal silica used as hard template (7-22 nm). The specific surface area of mesoporous g-C3N4 could be tailored in the range of 189 m2/g-288 m2/g.

Polymeric Photocatalysts Based on Graphitic Carbon Nitride

“…Hard and soft templating methods are often used because they allow tuning of the porous structure of g‐C 3 N 4 by choosing different templates. Mesoporous g‐C 3 N 4 has been successfully obtained by using various precursors such as cyanamide, ammonium thiocyanate, thiourea, and urea in the presence of silica nanoparticles used as a hard template, the removal of which generated a 3D interconnected structure of g‐C 3 N 4 with a large surface area up to 373 m 2 g −1 . The resulting pore size was consistent with the size of the silica nanoparticles used as the template.…”

3D-phosphorus doped mesoporous graphitic carbon nitride based immunosensor for swine flu detection

“…Thus, peculiar attention has been focused on phosphorus-doped graphitic carbon nitride (P-g-C 3 N 4 ) for potential employment as an immobilization matrix for the fabrication of biosensors. 21,27,28…”

Carbon nitride based mesoporous materials as cathode matrix for high performance lithium–sulfur batteries

“…20 Due to the incorporation of nitrogen atoms in the carbon framework can improve the mechanical, eld-emission, conductivity and energy-storage properties, carbon nitride (CN) has attracted more and more attention. [21][22][23][24][25][26] In this work, we adopt a facile silica template nanocasting method to effectively synthesize mesoporous carbon nitride (MCN) based materials as cathode matrixes for to further effectively anchor sulfur, retard polysuldes shuttling and improve the electrochemical performance of cathode in Li/S batteries. MCN not only can provide a conductive framework for electron transport and lithium ions, but also an ideal network-like structure that forms a stable structure for trapping polysuldes during the charge-discharge process.…”