Colorful Silver/Carbon Nitride Composites Obtained by Photoreduction

The Ag⁺ photoreduction by graphitic carbon nitride(g-CN) materials in a high concentration of Ag⁺ solution is reported, and a series of colorful Ag/g-CN composites is prepared and characterized. The chromatic change correlates to the carbon nitride materials synthesized at different heating temperatures(CN_T, where T means heating temperature), taking advantage of the different photocatalytic activities of different CN_T. The mechanism beneath this phenomenon is attributed to two factors:the particle size of Ag NPs and the coordinate effect of Ag NPs on CN_T sheets. Interestingly, the multi-colors of Ag/g-CN composites display only on the CN_T materials synthesized from heating melamine-cyanuric acid precursor, but not on the CN_T from heating pure melamine. The color of the as-prepared Ag/g-CN composites can endure the corrosion of HNO₃ and ethanol, which shows a good chemical stability and may hint its application as chromophores.     

Highly Efficient and Chemoselective Tandem Hydroformylation-Hydrogenation of Alkenes to Alcohols over g-CN Supported Bimetallic Rh and Co Nanoparticles Catalysts

The objective of the tandem hydroformylation-hydrogenation of alkenes to corresponding alcohols was to design an efficient and stable heterogeneous catalyst. To this end, a series of novel heterogeneous graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN) supported bimetallic Rh−Co nanoparticle catalysts (Rh−Co/g-CN) were prepared and subsequently studied for this one-pot two-step reaction. The lamellar structure makes Rh and Co nanoparticles with diameters of <1 nm and 20 nm, respectively, homogeneously deposited on the surface of g-CN layers, exhibit remarkable conversion of styrene (99.9 %) and chemoselectivity for alcohol (87.8 %). More importantly, Co nanoparticles are found to play an important role in the improvement of the chemoselectivity for alcohol due to the formation of catalytic active species [HCo(CO)_y]. Besides the detailed investigation of the catalytic properties of Rh−Co/g-CN under different reaction conditions, the reuse of Rh−Co/g-CN was conducted for five times and no evident decrease in the activity and chemoselectivity was observed. Therefore, we expect that this work could offer an initial insight into g-CN-based heterogeneous catalyst on the tandem hydroformylation-hydrogenation reaction.