TY - JOUR AU - Wu, Yunyan AU - Xiong, Pan AU - Wu, Jianchun AU - Huang, Zengliang AU - Sun, Jingwen AU - Liu, Qinqin AU - Cheng, Xiaonong AU - Yang, Juan AU - Zhu, Junwu AU - Zhou, Yazhou PY - 2021/01/04 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Band Engineering and Morphology Control of Oxygen-Incorporated Graphitic Carbon Nitride Porous Nanosheets for Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution JF - Nano-Micro Letters JA - Nano-Micro Lett VL - 13 IS - SE - Articles DO - 10.1007/s40820-020-00571-6 UR - https://www.nmlett.org/index.php/nml/article/view/812 SP - 48 AB - <p>Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>)-based photocatalysts have shown great potential in the splitting of water. However, the intrinsic drawbacks of g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>, such as low surface area, poor diffusion, and charge separation efficiency, remain as the bottleneck to achieve highly efficient hydrogen evolution. Here, a hollow oxygen-incorporated g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> nanosheet (OCN) with an improved surface area of 148.5&nbsp;m<sup>2</sup>&nbsp;g<sup>−1</sup> is fabricated by the multiple thermal treatments under the N<sub>2</sub>/O<sub>2</sub> atmosphere, wherein the C–O bonds are formed through two ways of physical adsorption and doping. The physical characterization and theoretical calculation indicate that the O-adsorption can promote the generation of defects, leading to the formation of hollow morphology, while the O-doping results in reduced band gap of g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>. The optimized OCN shows an excellent photocatalytic hydrogen evolution activity of 3519.6&nbsp;μmol&nbsp;g<sup>−1</sup>&nbsp;h<sup>−1</sup> for ~ 20&nbsp;h, which is over four times higher than that of g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> (850.1&nbsp;μmol&nbsp;g<sup>−1</sup>&nbsp;h<sup>−1</sup>) and outperforms most of the reported g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> catalysts.</p><p>Highlights:</p><p>1 The multiple thermal treatments strategy is proposed for preparing the hollow oxygen-incorporated g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> nanosheets (OCN).<br>2 Oxygen-adsorption creates a lot of defects to the formation of hollow and monolayered structure, while oxygen-doping reduces the band gap significantly.<br>3 OCN exhibits stable and high photocatalytic hydrogen evolution with increased surface area, enhanced charge transport, and reduced band gap.</p> ER -