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Convenient fabrication of BiOBr ultrathin nanosheets with rich oxygen vacancies for photocatalytic selective oxidation of secondary amines

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Abstract

Photocatalytic oxidation has been widely employed in organic synthesis, by virtue of the green, mild and simple reaction conditions as well as high selectivity. Introducing oxygen vacancies (OVs) with proper concentrations into the photocatalysts has been proven as an effective strategy to boost the catalytic performances. However, the currently used treatment method under high temperature at reducing atmosphere inevitably introduces a large number of OVs at the interior of the catalyst and serving as the recombination centers of carriers. To address this issue, here we develop a facile solvothermal process to prepare ultrathin BiOBr nanosheets with rich surface OVs. This method effectively decreases the bulk of the material and the ratio of interior OVs, rendering most of the OVs exposed on the surfaces which act as exposed catalytic sites and enhance the separation of carriers, therefore significantly elevates the photocatalytic performances. For the photo-oxidation reaction of secondary amines, under the conditions of visible light, ambient temperature and atmosphere, the BiOBr nanosheets featuring rich surface OVs deliver a doubled conversion compared to those with low OV concentrations, and a high selectivity of 99%, a high stability as the performance shows no reduction after 5 times of circular reaction.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2016YFA0202801 and 2017YFA0700101), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21890383, 21872076, 21573119, and 21590792) and Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. JQ18007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xuanjue Tong, Xing Cao, Tong Han, Weng-Chon Cheong, Rui Lin, Zheng Chen, Dingsheng Wang, Chen Chen, Qing Peng & Yadong Li

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  1. Xuanjue Tong
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  2. Xing Cao
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  3. Tong Han
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  4. Weng-Chon Cheong
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  5. Rui Lin
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  7. Dingsheng Wang
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  8. Chen Chen
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  9. Qing Peng
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  10. Yadong Li
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Correspondence to Qing Peng or Yadong Li.

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Convenient fabrication of BiOBr ultrathin nanosheets with rich oxygen vacancies for photocatalytic selective oxidation of secondary amines

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Tong, X., Cao, X., Han, T. et al. Convenient fabrication of BiOBr ultrathin nanosheets with rich oxygen vacancies for photocatalytic selective oxidation of secondary amines. Nano Res. 12, 1625–1630 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-2404-x

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