Recent advances of graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) based materials for photocatalytic applications: A review
Tengfei Bao, Xuejing Li, Shuming Li, Heng Rao, Xiaoju Men, Ping She, Jun‐Sheng Qin
Abstract
Photocatalytic solar energy conversion has drawn increasing attention, which holds great potential to deal with the energy crisis and environmental issues. As a typical semiconductor photocatalyst, graphite nitrogen carbon (g-C3N4) has been widely utilized owing to its nontoxicity and easy preparation properties. However, pristine g-C3N4 also faces the limitations of unsatisfactory light absorption, few active sites, and a rapid combination of photo-induced charge. To further optimize the photochemical catalytic performance of g-C3N4, tremendous efforts were devoted to modifying g-C3N4, including morphological regulation, element doping, and heterogeneous engineering. Some considerable progress has been achieved in g-C3N4-based photocatalytic hydrogen generation (PHE) from water splitting, photocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction (PCR), photocatalytic nitrogen reduction (PNR), photocatalytic removal of pollutants, and photocatalytic bacteria elimination. However, a frontier and comprehensive summary of g-C3N4-based photocatalysis is rarely reported. Herein, we provide an all-inclusive and updated investigation of the recent advances in modification methods of g-C3N4 and photocatalytic reactions based on g-C3N4 in the past five years. This conclusive remark may provide a new physical insight into the development of g-C3N4-based solar energy conversion.