Critical role of hydrogen bonding between microcrystalline cellulose and g-C3N4 enables highly efficient photocatalysis

Abstract

Developing a highly efficient photocatalyst for energy and environmental applications is urgently required. Herein, graphitic carbon nitride (CN) coupled with microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) (denoted as MCC-X/CN) shows excellent photocatalytic performance for tetracycline (TC) degradation and H₂ evolution. And the optimized MCC-0.05/CN shows an improved TC degradation rate (K_app = 0.019 min⁻¹) and H₂ evolution rate (642.71 μmol g⁻¹ h⁻¹), which are 1.9 and 22 times higher than those of pure CN, respectively. This improvement primarily results from hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) between CN and MCC, which enables excellent charge separation and migration, leading to the outstanding photoelectrochemical properties of MCC-0.05/CN.