Elemental phosphorus for recent sustainable processes: rules and strategies in preparation and applications

Abstract

Nowadays, several sustainable processes have attracted worldwide attention, such as photocatalytic environmental remediation, the generation of renewable energy (e.g. hydrogen production) and energy storage (e.g. lithium-ion batteries). For promoting these processes, one of the central issues is to develop novel and efficient materials. Recently, the ever obscure material-elemental phosphorus (especially crystalline red phosphorus and black phosphorus) has quickly become the pop star in these sustainable studies and continues to grow due to its advances in special molecular structure (various phosphorus atomic clusters as building blocks) and versatility in modifications. Currently, the further development of elemental phosphorus material is greatly limited by the following problems: it is still difficult to fabricate crystalline red phosphorus and bulk black phosphorus crystals via facile and sustainable methods; it is still urgent to unravel the rules of the mutual transformation between phosphorus allotropes during their preparation and applications; the understanding of their working mechanism during the sustainable processes is still incomplete. Therefore, based mainly on recent publications, herein, the history and molecular structure of elemental phosphorus are firstly summarized, then the current and newly arising preparation methods for elemental phosphorus (especially crystalline red phosphorus) are comprehensively covered. Moreover, the performance of elemental phosphorus in typical sustainable processes is summarized and analysed, especially focusing on their working mechanisms at the molecular level. Finally, the challenges and future development of elemental phosphorus materials are forecasted.