Combination of Carbon Nitride and Carbon Nanotubes: Synergistic Catalysts for Energy Conversion

Abstract

Due to their versatile features and environmental friendliness, functionalized carbon materials show great potential in practical applications, especially in energy conversion. Developing carbon composites with properties that can be modulated by simply changing the ratio of the original materials is an intriguing synthetic strategy. Here, we took cyanamide and multiwalled carbon nanotubes as precursors and introduced a facile method to fabricate a series of graphitic carbon nitride/carbon nanotubes (g-C3 N4 /CNTs) composites. These composites demonstrated different practical applications with different weight ratios of the components, that is, they showed synergistic effects in optoelectronic conversion when g-C3 N4 was the main ingredient and in oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) when CNTs dominated the composites. Our experiments indicated that the high electrical conductivity of carbon nanotubes promoted the transmission of the charges in both cases.

Solar‐Driven H2O2 Generation From H2O and O2 Using Earth‐Abundant Mixed‐Metal Oxide@Carbon Nitride Photocatalysts

“…From the Tauc plots, the MMO@C 3 N 4 has a band gap of 2.89 eV, which is 0.01 eV larger than that of C 3 N 4 (2.88 eV). The band gap value of C 3 N 4 was close to that of bulk g‐C 3 N 4 reported in the literature . The valence band (VB) positions were estimated according to the band gap and the conduction band (CB) positions.…”

Energy-level dependent H 2 O 2 production on metal-free, carbon-content tunable carbon nitride photocatalysts

“…The band gap is 2.81, 2.76, 2.87, 2.80 and 2.83 eV for C 3 N 4 , C 3 N 4 -Carbon(0.003), C 3 N 4 -Carbon(0.006), C 3 N 4 -Carbon(0.01) and C 3 N 4 -Carbon(0.03), respectively. These values are close to or slightly smaller than that of bulk g-C 3 N 4 (2.85 eV) [44] . This suggests that the band gap is not apparently affected by carbon doping.…”

Facile oxalic acid-assisted construction of laminated porous N-deficient graphitic carbon nitride: Highly efficient visible-light-driven hydrogen evolution photocatalyst

“…In the last few decades, massive researches oriented at developing alternative techniques for gaining sufficient, sustainable and eco-friendly energy have gradually emerged, with the mass consumption of fossil fuels and the ever-booming demand for energy due to the acceleration of industrialization [1] . Thus, photocatalysis has been developed to provide promising techniques for meeting these demands [2][3][4] .…”