Also called melon, polymeric carbon nitride
A metal-free yellow polymer made by simply heating urea or melamine, which uses visible light to split water into hydrogen or to break down pollutants. It is cheap, non-toxic and very stable, which explains its enormous research popularity; its weakness is that it converts light into chemical energy far less efficiently than practical solar fuels would need.
Readiness runs lab → prototype → pilot → deployed.
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Idealised heptazine or triazine sheets give gaps and band edges that differ from real, hydrogen-rich melon, so models should include buckling, stacking and defects. Excitons are strongly bound and charge separation is slow, which means band-edge alignment from DFT is necessary but not sufficient to predict photocatalytic activity.
Report precursor, heating rate, temperature and atmosphere – all change the structure. Characterise with XRD (the (002) stacking peak near 27.4° 2θ for Cu Kα), FTIR (heptazine breathing mode near 810 cm−1), XPS N 1s and elemental analysis. For photocatalysis, report apparent quantum yield at a defined wavelength, not only µmol per hour per gram.
The cheapest and most scalable photocatalyst in this catalogue, but low efficiency limits solar-fuel applications. Near-term niches are water treatment and self-cleaning or antibacterial surfaces.
The newest items tagged g-C3N4, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.
A dual-precursor chemical system is used to achieve wafer-scale epitaxy growth of boron carbon nitride, a high-performance p-type semiconductor, for potential integration in efficient 2D materials for electronics.
Graphene is flat. But that doesn't mean other 2D materials—particularly those containing more than one element—necessarily share the same structure. In the past, researchers have often simplified these materials by modeling them as perfectly flat sheets.
All 3 items tagged g-C₃N₄ in the news feed · RSS feed for g-C₃N₄