| Seminar Title : “A Highly Active Mesoporous Carbon Nitride Prepared from Urea Precursor for Photocatalytic Removal of Phenol” Date : 29 December 2015 (Tuesday) Time : 2.30pm – 4.00pm Venue : CSNano Meeting Room, Centre for Sustainable Nanomaterials (CSNano), Ibnu Sina Institute for Scientific & Industrial Research (ISI-SIR), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai |
Dr. Lee Shu Chin
Postdoctoral research fellow (4G PHOTOCAT grant)
Centre for Sustainable Nanomaterials
Ibnu Sina Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
“A Highly Active Mesoporous Carbon Nitride Prepared from Urea Precursor for Photocatalytic Removal of Phenol”
Mesoporous carbon nitride (MCN) is one potential visible light-driven photocatalyst that is metal-free and non-toxic. Various molecular precursors have been used for the synthesis of MCN, but the precursors have drawbacks that are not desired for large scale production of MCN, such as costliness, toxicity to human as well as environment or involvement of more than one molecular precursor. In this work, urea that is abundant and inexpensive was used as a single molecular precursor to prepare MCN. Series of MCN was synthesized successfully through thermal polymerization of urea precursor by hard template approach using non-porous silica as the templates. Initial mass ratios of urea precursor to silica template were varied and the properties of the prepared MCN samples were investigated. Although the prepared MCN samples possessed similar structures and optical properties, it was revealed that the specific surface area, pore size distribution and morphology of the MCN samples depend on the initial mass ratio of urea precursor to silica template. In the photocatalytic activities for phenol removal, MCN with urea/silica mass ratio of 5 (MCN-5) appeared as the most optimum ratio, removing 74% phenol after 6 h visible light irradiation, which the activity was 3.7 times higher than the bulk carbon nitride (BCN). The high photocatalytic activity of the MCN-5 is a result of its excellent properties of large specific surface area and uniform mesopores. This work shows that MCN is a potential photocatalyst for removal of organic pollutant under visible light irradiation.