Improved visible-light driven photocatalysis by loading Au onto C3N4 nanorods for degradation of RhB and reduction of CO2

In this work, a solution-assembly technique was adopted to compose the g-C3N4 (CN) nanorods (CN1, CN2 and CN3) with a desired microstructure. Subsequently, different amounts of Au nanoparticles (NPs) with sizes ~10 nm were loaded on CN2 nanorods by an in-site reduction approach, thereby a series of plasmonic photocatalyst (CN2-A1, CN2-A2 and CN2-A3) were fabricated. The activities were investigated by photodegrading Rhodamine B (RhB) and photoreducing CO2 into CO with the irradiation of visible light, respectively. And the degradation rates of RhB over CN2-A2 photocatalyst were 97.28% in 80 min, which was 1.45 times higher than that of pure CN2 (66.90%). Moreover, without any sacrificial agents, the reduction yields of CO2 into CO by CN2-A2 photocatalyst was 3.11 μmol/g in 4 h, that was 2.46 times higher than that of CN2 (1.26 μmol/g). The improved photocatalytic performance was owning to the stronger localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect, which not only increased the utilization efficiency of visible light, but also sped up the formation and separation of photo-induced carriers. In addition, a potential charge transfer mechanism was tentatively proposed on account of as-obtained test dates.