Associate Prof. Ziyang Lu Published article on Chemical Communications with the title of "Regulation of coordination and doping environment via target molecular transformation for boosting selective photocatalytic ability".
Abstract: In water treatment technology, photocatalytic technology with green, low energy consumption and other advantages has attracted wide attention. The transformation engineering of photocatalyst surfaces has become an effective means to improve the efficient and selective removal of water pollutants. Here, a novel transformed CdO with low coordination and N doping environment was simply synthesized through the involvement of the target molecule tetracycline. The results showed that the shedding of surface hydroxyl groups led to low coordination environment, and N doping formed a new doping energy level, which increased the charge density and promoted the migration and separation of photo-generated carriers. Its photocatalytic performance was 4.32 times higher than that of that of hydroxy-rich CdO and selectivity coefficient was 4.8. Combined with theoretical calculation and in-situ Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) analysis, the significant improvement of selectivity was due to the interaction of the doped N atom with the methyl carbon in tetracycline. This work provided a new idea for the simultaneous construction of low coordination environment and N-doped materials for efficient selective photocatalysis.
Acknowledgements: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Young Scientific and Technological Talents Support Project of Jiangsu Association for Science and Technology, etc.
Full text link: https://doi.org/10.1039/d2cc03373a
