Mesoporous graphitic carbon nitride decorated with Cu nanoparticles for enhanced photo-degradation for tartrazine yellow

Two strategies were combined to modify the carbon nitride, which are creating a mesoporous structure, and deposition of Cu nanoparticles, to creat high sepcific surfaces area within a carbon nitride framework and inhibit the recombination of electron and hole pairs, thereby increase the efficiency of photocatalytic activity. To make the material, melamine powder, which is inexpensive, easy to get and non-poisonous, was used as precursor and, SiO2 was used as a hard template to create a different size mesoporous structure through a simple thermal condensation method. Two different disired amount of copper nanoparticles were deposited on the surface of mesoporous carbon nitride (MCN) which are 5% and 10% wt.% through a simple precipitation-reduction method. To futher investigate the photocatalytic activity, the Cu-MCN materials were used as photocatalysts for degradation for tartrazine yellow which is a harmful dye in aqueous solution under UV-light irradiation. The result showed that Cu-MCN has good photocatalytic activity under light irradiation. Among six sample synthesized, Cu(10)-MCN showed the best photocatalytic activity due to its mesoporous structure and optimized amount and type of Cu in it. A mechanism was proposed to explain the effectiveness of material to photo-degrade tartrazine yellow. Finally, we make some suggestion which highlighted the future development of g-C3N4 based photocatalysts.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Jiahe X