Verity L. Piercy

Band Structure Engineering of Carbon Nitride Hybrid Photocatalysts for CO2 Reduction in Aqueous Solutions Verity L Piercy, Gaia Neri, Troy D. Manning, Andrea Pugliese, Frédéric Blanc, Robert Palgrave, Alexander Cowan and Matthew J. Rosseinsky Abstract Through the co-polymerisation of dicyandiamide and barbituric acid precursors, a series of visible light active carbon nitride photocatalysts has been prepared and characterized, and their photocatalytic activity has been evaluated.

The development of scalable photocatalysts that can split water efficiently by using solar energy would transform the energy landscape, providing a way to generate hydrogen sustainably. Historically, research has focused on inorganic semiconductors, but in the past 12 years there has been a rapid increase in the study of organic photocatalysts for water splitting (1) following studies in 2009 which showed that graphitic carbon nitride was an effective hydrogen evolution photocatalyst.