Facile and rapid preparation of hexagonal boron nitride via microwave heating method and its application in photocatalytic H2 evolution

Abstract This paper presents a novel application of microwave-assisted heating approach in the preparation of hexagonal phase boron nitride (h-BN). Results reported that h-BN was successfully synthesized in 50 min with boric acid and urea as raw materials. The as-synthesized h-BN presents a richer defect structure than the sample prepared at 900 °C in a nitrogen atmosphere (BN-900). The improved photoabsorption performance and the charge separation efficiency are thus obtained, which results in a much better performance than BN-900 and commercial BN in photocatalytic H2 evolution.