Engineering and characterization of high surface area graphitic carbon nitrides for hydrogen sorption

Theoretical calculations predict graphitic carbon nitride to produce a binding energy to hydrogen (6.4 kJ/mol) which is greater than that of pure graphene, making it attractive as a storage medium. However, the prohibitively small surface areas characteristic of g-CN materials dramatically limit H2 uptake. We discuss efforts to increase surface areas through physical/chemical exfoliation and templating. N2 sorption directly determines improvements to surface area, EF/TEM maps the thickness of aggregated planes, powder XRD indicates a novel, 2-phase structure, and XPS quantifies in-plane chemistry largely independent of the literature, which fails in a consensus regarding binding energy assignments.