An innovative approach to enhance photocatalytic perfomance

In the realm of photocatalysis based on carbon nitride (CN) semiconductor, increase of the material’s surface area is an essential aspect to consider. High surface area allows improvement of the catalyst’s performance as it increases the number of catalytically active sites. Graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN), the conventional starting platform for the assembly of CN-based photocatalysts typically suffers from low surface areas.

In Glas-A-Fuels, one of the objectives is to use CN as the photoresponsive host of single metal atoms, so that managing synthesis of CN with high surface area is highly important. Various strategies are being adopted to make high surface area CN. One of the most appealing methods investigated by UTR - University of Trieste achieved the formation of ultra nanosheets of CN with (CN UNS) a 10-fold increase of the surface area. Measurements of the surface area are mostly relying on the physical adsorption of gases such as N2 or Kr at low temperature.

A top-quality analyser for surface area and porosity (ASAP 3FLEX model) was acquired for the Glas-A-Fuel project that is able to measure surface area and other relevant textural properties with high accuracy. The instrument will be a key element of the research tasks on developing CN-based single atom catalysts.