A low-dosage silver-loaded flower-like Bi2WO6 nanosheets toward efficiently photocatalytic degradation of sulfamethoxazole

Abstract

Semiconducting photocatalysts composited with noble nanometals can be regarded as one of effective strategies to enhance the photocatalytic activity, attributed to a synergy of heterojuction formation and surface plasmon resonance effect. However, the dosage of nanometal in the composite for achieving an optimal performance is commonly larger than 10 wt%, causing high cost in raw materials. In this work, a composite photocatalyst of flower-like bismuth tungstate (Bi2WO6) nanosheets decorated by low-dosage silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) with the excellent photocatalytic activity for sulfamethoxazole (SMX) degradation was prepared. Further, the morphological and structural characteristics, chemical compositions, and photoelectrical properties of this composite photocatalyst (Ag/Bi2WO6) were investigated. Different loading amounts of Ag NPs (1, 3 and 5 wt%) in Ag/Bi2WO6 were modulated, and when the dosage of Ag NPs was controlled to be only 3 wt%, the composite photocatalyst exhibited the most efficient degradation that 95.04% of SMX was removed within 60 min under visible light irradiation, which has around 3 times enhancement compared to single Bi2WO6. The sacrificial agent experiment indicated that •O2− and •OH are the main active substances in the photocatalytic degradation of SMX. And the cyclic experiment further confirmed the Ag/Bi2WO6 composite with high stability and reusability. The photocatalytic mechanism was verifiably proposed that the enhanced degradation performance was derived from more effective light absorption and photogenerated charge separation by loading Ag NPs onto Bi2WO6. Our primary results provide a basic platform for exploring the high catalytic-activity photocatalysts with low-dosage noble nanometals.