Boosting Visible-Light Photocatalytic Performance of Graphitic Carbon Nitride by Regulating its D-A Structure Via Maleamide

Abstract

Graphitic carbon nitride (GCN) has attracted much attention due to its many advantages as a kind of photocatalyst, including low cost, easy to prepare, eco-friendly and so on. However, GCN suffers from limited light-absorption capacity and rapid recombination of photogenerated charge carriers. Herein, a new kind of photocatalyst based on GCN has been synthesized by introducing a small molecule compound (maleamide) through a facile thermal polycondensation method and applied it to photocatalytic removal of bisphenol A (BPA). The photocatalytic degradation performance of GCN-20 was greatly boosted compared with that of pristine GCN. At the same time, GCN-20 exhibits good stability after five cycles’ experiments. The promoted photocatalytic performance is mainly attributed to enhanced D-A structure by electron-withdrawing group, which accelerates charge separation and inhibits recombination of free holes and electrons. The photogenerated electrons were combined with absorbed O2 to generate abundant superoxide radicals (▪O2-), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and hydroxyl radicals (▪OH), which played a dominant role in the photocatalytic degradation process.

Keywords: Carbon nitride, Maleamide, Photocatalytic degradation, BPA