Solvothermal preparation of nitrogen-doped carbon dots with PET waste as precursor and their application in LEDs and water detection

Developing novel, alternative ways to recycle PET waste, which has an important influence on reduction of landfilling and CO2 emissions, has always been a research hot spot for industry and academy. In this work, PET waste was adopted as precursor for the preparation of nitrogen-doped Carbon Dots (NCDs). Firstly, PET oligomers were obtained by alcoholysis of PET waste with ethylene glycol. Then, the mixture without isolation and purification as well as pyromellitic acid dia-nhydride and urea were adopted as precursors for the preparation of NCDs by solvothermal method with tetrahydrofuran (THF) as solvent. The as-prepared NCDs has a spherical structure with an average particle size of 2.3 nm. What is more, NCDs exhibit excitation-independent emission properties, the largest excitation peak and emission peak of NCDs located in 360 nm and 470 nm, and the fluorescence quantum yield is 48.16 %. In term of application, NCDs are dispersed in PMMA and loaded on 365 nm and 430 nm LED chips to obtain LED devices emitting yellow light ((0.55, 0.44), 2018 K) and warm white light ((0.37, 0.31), 3783 K), respectively. In addition, NCDs could be adopted as fluorescent probe for the construction of sensor for water in organic solvents based on dynamic quenching of NCDs, and the limit of detection (LOD) is 0.00001 %.