Cyanuric Acid-Assisted Synthesis of Hierarchical Amorphous Carbon Nitride Assembled by Ultrathin Oxygen-Doped Nanosheets for Excellent Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation

Amorphous carbon nitride with typical short-range order arrangement as an effective photocatalyst is worth exploring but remains a great challenge because its disordered structure induces severe recombination of photogenerated charge carriers. Herein, for the first time, we demonstrate that a hierarchical amorphous carbon nitride (HACN) with structural oxygen incorporation can be synthesized via a cyanuric acid-assisted melem hydrothermal process, accompanied by freeze-drying and pyrolysis. The complex composed of melem and cyanuric acid exhibiting a unique 3D self-supporting skeleton and significant phase transformation is responsible for the formation of an interconnected hierarchical framework and amorphous structure for HACN. These features are beneficial to enhance its visible light harvesting by the multiple-reflection effect within the architecture consisting of more exposed porous nanosheets and introducing a long band tail absorption. The well-designed morphology, band tail state, and oxygen doping effectively inhibit rapid band-to-band recombination of the photogenerated electrons and holes and facilitate subsequent separation. Accordingly, the HACN catalyst exhibits exceptional visible light (λ > 420 nm)-driven photoreduction for hydrogen production with a rate of 82.4 μmol h–1, which is 21.7 and 9.5 times higher than those of melem-derived carbon nitride and crystalline nanotube carbon nitride counterparts, respectively, and significantly surpasses those of most reported amorphous carbon nitrides. Our controlling of rearrangement of the in situ supramolecular self-assembly of melem oligomer using cyanuric acid directly instructs the development of highly efficient amorphous photocatalysts for converting solar energy into hydrogen fuel.