(138g) Role of Nitrogen Addition to Reduced Graphene Oxide-TiO2 Nanocompostites in Enhancing CO2 Photoreduction

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and utilization is a promising potential technology to address global climate change. Photocatalytic conversion of CO₂ into hydrocarbon fuels has attracted abundant research attention in recent years. However, there have been few reports about CO₂ capture and conversion on the same material so far. Addition of nitrogen has been reported to be a feasible approach to enhance materials’ CO₂ capture performance. In this work, we demonstrated two ways to fabricate the nitrogen contained reduced graphene oxide (NrGO)-TiO₂ nanocomposites and discussed the function of nitrogen surface modification, as well as the nitrogen structure doping. We found that both nitrogen surface modification and structure doping could enhance the CO₂ photoreduction of rGO-TiO₂ materials significantly.

It was demonstrated that NrGO (N surface modified rGO or N structure doped rGO) with an appropriate N quantity and N-bonding configuration acted as a dual-functional promoter, simultaneously enhancing CO₂ adsorption on the catalyst surface and facilitating electron-hole separation, while eventually boosted the photocatalytic performance. Experimental results in this work provide a better understanding of the critical roles of nitrogen addition in the synthesized composites and also inspire the ongoing interest in a better design of other N-contained graphene based materials for photoreduction of CO₂.

Reference:

Lin, L. Y., Nie, Y., Kavadiya, S., Soundappan, T., & Biswas, P. (2017). N-doped reduced graphene oxide promoted nano TiO₂ as a bifunctional adsorbent/photocatalyst for CO₂ photoreduction: Effect of N species. Chemical Engineering Journal, 316, 449-460.