Carbon nitrides (CN) are fascinating materials that has been cynosure of materials scientists owing to their unique properties including semiconductivity, basicity, high hardness, chemical robustness, and a high thermal, and mechanical stability. These extraordinary properties makes avail them in wide range of application possibilities in various fields including photo and electro-catalysis of water splitting, basic catalytic, carbon capture, and energy storage properties. Practical applications of these fascinating materials in the fields of catalysis and adsorption where specific surface area and pore volume play an important role in controlling their performance are quite limited because of their lower specific surface area (&lt; 10 m2 g-1) due to their non-porous nature. These problems can be overcome by the creation of mesoporosity in the CN matrix through the nanotemplating strategies while retaining the carbon and nitrogen chemistry. Most of the research on the preparation of mesoporous carbon nitrides (MCNs) has been dedicated to the theoretically predicted C3N4 material. However, the performance of MCN materials can be further improved by the addition of more number of nitrogen in the CN framework, but this remains huge challenge the due to low stability of the nitrogen in the carbon matrix. We have recently reported on the synthesis of a new class of MCNs with C3N5 and C3N6 stoichiometries through the self-condensation followed by polymerization of high nitrogen containing novel nitrogen rich precursors, 3-Amino-1,4,4-triazole and aminoguanidine, via nano templating approach, by using mesoporous 2D and 3D mesoporous silica materials such as SBA-15 and KIT-6 as templates. Well-ordered mesoporosities having 2D and 3D pore topologies, high specific surface areas (up to 350 m2 g-1) and large pore volumes (0.63 cm3 g-1) have been observed in these novel MCNs. Uniqueness of these nitrogen enriched MCNs is their small bandgap of 2.2-2.5 eV, which is much lower than that of C3N4 (2.7 eV) by virtue of their unique framework structure, and hence they can harvest the large spectrum of visible light for the photocatalytic H2 production (801 µmol g-1) directly from water. The details of the molecular structure, characterizations and utilization of these MCNs for range of important catalytic applications such as Knoevenagel condensation and Friedel-Crafts acylation, photocatalytic HER reactions as well as for CO2 capture will be presented in the conference.

Nitrogen enriched mesoporous carbon nitrides: Applications in heterogeneous (photo) catalysis

256th National Meeting (2018)

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