Engineering carbon nitride with cyanide groups for efficient photocatalytic alcohol oxidation and H2O2 production-Utilization of photogenerated electrons and holes

Abstract Porous carbon nitride photocatalysts with sufficient cyanide groups were facile fabricated through simple calcination process with cheap salt as porogen. The introduction of cyanide groups can enhance charge separation efficiency and reductive activities of photogenerated electrons of carbon nitride. The optimized CN-S catalysts can selectively oxidize alcohols to aldehydes with broad scope as well as reduce oxygen to H2O2. The tandem strategy can photocatalytic produce H2O2 with a rate of more than 200 μmol h−1 g−1 which is nearly 19 times than that without alcohols and fulfilled utilization of both photo-generated electrons and holes.