Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
Chem Asian J, 2012 Sep;7(9):2139-44.
PMID: 22733646 DOI: 10.1002/asia.201200383

Abstract

A urea precursor was used for the first time to prepare mesoporous carbon nitride (MCN) by a thermal polymerization process with silica nanospheres as a hard template. Although the prepared MCN samples have 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 to silica. Compared to the bulk carbon nitride (BCN) that only gave 20% phenol removal (6 h of irradiation), the activities can be enhanced up to 74% on MCN samples for photocatalytic removal of phenol under visible-light irradiation. The highest conversion was obtained on MCN with an initial mass ratio of urea to silica of 5, which has high surface area of 191 m(2) g(-1) and a nanoporous structure with uniform pore-size distribution of 7 nm. In addition to the high activity, the MCN sample also showed high photocatalytic stability.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.