Heteroepitaxial Growth of Narrow Band Gap Carbon-Rich Carbon Nitride Using In Situ Polymerization to Empower Sunlight-Driven Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We describe an in situ -polymerized conformal thin layer coating of narrow band gap carbon-rich carbon nitride (NBG-CRCN) on titania nanorod arrays to design a binary semiconductor heterojunction photocatalyst. The in situ polymerization creates a strong interaction between the TiO 2 nanorod substrate and the carbon nitride film, which prevents leaching of CRCN in liquid electrolytes. A unique aspect of our work is developing an easy and inexpensive technique for the heteroepitaxial growth of mechanically and photochemically stable carbon nitride thin films with intimate contact at the CN:TNR heterojunction interface. This method aids in overcoming one of the main problems with carbon nitride (CN), namely, the inability to produce an evenly distributed CN coating on a substrate. The synthesized NBG-CRCN@TNR extends the visible light absorption to 700 nm (E g = 1.7 eV) and red-shifts the photoluminescence (PL) emission peak to 580 nm. The peak shifts and broadening in the Raman spectra of the NBG-CRCN@TNR hybrid compared to those in TNR confirm an unusually strong interaction between TiO 2 and NBG-CRCN. An easy and inexpensive technique to heteroepitaxially grow CRCN (002) on rutile TiO 2 (110) is confirmed by advanced characterization. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), selected-area electron diffraction (SAED), and grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS) suggest the heteroepitaxial growth of (002) CRCN on rutile TiO 2 (110). Under AM1.5G solar illumination, the NBG-CRCN@TNR hybrid shows superior performance in photoelectrochemical water splitting, generating a photocurrent density as high as 4.3 mA cm –2 in 1 M KOH under 0.6 V external bias, rising to 8.4 mA cm –2 in the presence of a hole scavenger (methanol). An impressive hydrogen evolution rate of 26.51 μmol h –1 with 88.12% Faradaic efficiency is recorded. Establishing a high-quality interface between g-C 3 N 4 and titania permits effective charge carrier separation, leading to enhanced photocatalytic activity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".