Abstract:
Facilitating the efficient separation of carriers in photocatalytic processes has always been a problem for researchers. Recently, the use of piezoelectric effect as an effective strategy to enhance photocatalytic process from inhibitting the recombination of electrons and holes has attracted great interest. Here, we prepared 1D NaNbO
3 nanorods coated with g-C
3N
4 heterojunction materials as the object to investigate the performance enhancement mechanism in the piezo-photocatalytic process by applying an ultrasonic field to introduce the piezoelectric effect. The microscopic morphology and bonding of the materials were investigated through SEM and XPS characterization. The results show that after the introduction of the piezoelectric effect using ultrasonic, NaNbO
3@g-C
3N
4 exhibites a higher H
2 evolution rate in the piezo-photocatalytic process (1.02 mmol·g
−1·h
−1) than in the single photocatalytic process (0.49 mmol·g
−1·h
−1), indicating that the constructed NaNbO
3@g-C
3N
4 heterojunction materials with the support of piezoelectric effect greatly promote the separation of carriers in the photocatalytic process, inhibite their complexation and improve the photocatalytic performance. In addition, based on the data analysis, the mechanism of piezo-photocatalytic coupling effects is proposed for the design and development of highly efficient piezoelectric photocatalysts.