Abstract
Tailoring terminated edge of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) for enhancing catalysis has turned to be an imperative for the rational design of a highly active aerobic catalyst. Herein, a tailoring N-terminated porous BN (P-BN) strategy is reported with a zinc (Zn) salt as a dual-functional template. The Zn salt acts as both an in situ template and an N-terminated defective edges directing agent. The zinc salt template turns to Zn nanoparticles (Zn NPs) and functions as physical spacers, which are subsequently removed at a higher temperature, for producing P-BN, whose high surface area is high to 1579 m2 g−1. Moreover, because of the lower electronegativity of Zn, boron (B) atoms are partly replaced by Zn atoms and ultimately preferred to N-terminated edges with the volatilization of Zn NPs. Owing to the moderate dissociative energy of oxygen atoms on N-terminated edges, the N-terminated edges are proved to be the origin of an enhanced aerobic catalytic activity by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Moreover, the DFT calculation result is experimentally verified.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1701857 |
| Journal | Small |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 44 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 27 2017 |
Funding
P.W.W. and S.Z.Y. contributed equally to this work. The authors thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21576122, 21376111, and 21506083), and the Postgraduate Innovation Project of Jiangsu Province (NO. KYLX15_1067). P.W.W. is grateful to a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council. The electron microscopy (S.Z.Y.) was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, and through a user project supported by ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division of U.S. Department of Energy. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which was supported by the National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1053575 and Grant No DMR160118. S.D. was sponsored by the Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, DOE.
Keywords
- 2D
- N-terminated
- boron nitride
- catalytic oxidation
- defective