Porous BN/TiO2 hybrid nanosheets as highly efficient visible-light-driven photocatalysts

Porous boron nitride (BN) nanosheets, which possess extreme large surface areas, high thermal conductivity and special chemical activities, have demonstrated advantages in water cleaning and energy storage. However, they are usually considered as an underachieving catalytic material for photocatalysis and other photovoltaic conversion applications due to their wide bad gap of 5.5 eV. Here, we report a novel porous BN/TiO2 hybrid nanosheets with the formation of new B-O-Ti bondings between the boron dangling bonds at the open edges of pores of porous BN nanosheets and nanosized TiO2 particles. Such highly active bondings make the hybrid nanosheets responsive to an extended wavelength range from UV to visible light (lambda > 420 nm) spectrum and also substantially enhance the photocatalytic effect (up to 99%) for degradation of organic molecules. In addition, the porous BN/TiO2 hybrid nanosheets exhibit excellent cycling stability up to 5 cycles maintaining high visible-light photocatalytic activity (97%). These results provide new insights for design of advanced hybrid photocatalysts with actively chemical bonding species, which can be applied in environmental protection, water splitting, and photo-electrochemical conversion. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.