Three-dimensional Insight on Formation and Light-harvesting of Hollow-structure Carbon Nitride

Abstract

Designing nanoarchitectures of graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN) has been considered an effective approach to improve the photocatalytic performance, while a comprehensive understanding for the formation and the light-harvesting enhancement of fashionable hollow-structure g-CNs is lacking. Herein, electron tomography is applied to thoroughly elucidate the evolution from the rod-like melamine–cyanuric acid (MC) complex to hollow-structure g-CN in the supramolecular preorganization synthesis. Three-dimensional characterizations on this evolution unambiguously reveal that the formation of the hollow-structure is determined by the differentiated polymerization condensation between the inner region and the edges of the rod-like MC complex, ascribing to its loose interior and dense surfaces. The simulated electromagnetic field distribution of the obtained hollow-structure g-CN further indicates that nanoscale cavities/pores within the shell and coupling gaps of the inner architecture constitute abundant “hotspots” for amplifying the incident electromagnetic field and thereby for enhancing the light-harvesting and contributing to the performance improvement in photocatalysis.

Simultaneous detection of melamine and cyanuric acid using powder X‐ray diffraction

“…Based on the validation results, the observed extreme intensity of peak was determined from the robust lattice parameter of ME & CA on 45 mA/45 kV , 150.0[s] time‐per‐step at 0.006 [º] step size. In previous studies of XRD pattern refinement, the crystal structure parameters of ME & CA were explained with (110) lattice planes (Wang et al., 2020) and agree with the findings of this study. Apart from other advantages, the PXRD approach is a non‐destructive methodology that provides ample understanding of the multi phases and these are compared against the library databases of ICDD‐PDF4+ 2023.…”