Amino-Assisted NH₂-UiO-66 Anchored on Porous g-C₃N₄ for Enhanced Visible-Light-Driven CO₂ Reduction

Abstract

Constructing heterostructured photocatalysts is an efficient method to improve photocatalytic carbon dioxide (CO₂) reduction. Herein, holey g-C₃N₄ (HGN) with rich amino groups (-NH_x) was hybridized with NH₂-UiO-66 (NUZ) via a facile in situ growth method. NUZ nanocrystals were anchored on HGN via NHx-Zr-O chemical bonding, leading to the uniform dispersion and avoiding the leaching of NUZ, thus showing excellent stability in photocatalysis. The chemically bonded interfacial charge transfer effect originated from the NHx-Zr-O formation efficiently accelerated the separation and migration of charge carriers, improving the photoactivity. Benefiting from the NHx-Zr-O formation, the optimized NUZ/HGN-35% heterojunctions exhibited outstanding activity in the photoreduction of CO₂ to CO (31.6 μmol g^-1 h^-1), which was about 2 and 3 times higher than that of pure NUZ and HGN under visible-light irradiation. This study is expected to provide useful insights for constructing composites with strong interaction for CO₂ reduction, H₂ production, and N₂ reduction.