Facile preparation of BCN nanofibers with tunable band gaps

Abstract

As a new synthetic metal-free material, BCN has aroused great interests in the field of photocatalyst materials due to its lower cost as well as higher reliability and better sustainability. In this work, we prepared BCN nanofibers by electrospinning of precursor solution containing polyacrylonitrile and ammonia borane, and then pyrolyzed the polymer fibers in NH3. Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Scanning emission microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used to analyse the composition and structure of the samples. The results show that the BCN nanofibers have an average diameter of 50-100 nm and mainly compose of BN nanocrystals. C atoms are distributed at the BN grain boundary in terms of B-C and B-N bonds. The band gap of the fibers is between 2.1-2.7 eV and can be adjusted by changing the ratio of PAN and AB in the raw materials.