Abstract
Silver orthophosphate (Ag3PO4) is an attractive photocatalytic catalyst for disinfection and degradation, but its instability arising from silver release generates significant environmental issue. Aiming to develop a highly efficient and environmental-friendly catalyst, we synthesized Ag3PO4 nanoparticle incorporated hierarchical porous silica (Ag3PO4@h-SiO2) as a novel high-performance photocatalytic catalyst without observed silver release. Brain-like hierarchical porous SiO2 (h-SiO2) brings a scaffold support with high surface areas, and the h-SiO2 surface modified thiols are able to anchor in situ formed 10 nm Ag3PO4 to eliminate silver release. Systematic investigations revealed that because of its structural advantages, Ag3PO4@h-SiO2 show excellent disinfection and degradation ability under visible-light irradiation and stable characteristics without obviously observed silver leaching during photo-oxidation operation. In-depth scavenger study reveals Ag3PO4@h-SiO2 as an effective semiconducting photocatalyst stimulates the production of photo-generated reactive species, which dominate its distinguished disinfection performance via photo-oxidation.Graphical abstractAg3PO4 are anchored to thiol modified hierarchical porous SiO2 to produce a visible-light responsive photocatalyst of Ag3PO4@h-SiO2. The enhanced catalytic sites and surface areas promote pathogen disinfection, and the structure advantages minimize silver release to environment. Both H2O2 and holes being generated in photocatalysis dominate overall disinfection activity.
Highlights
The growing concern about potential health risk caused by the arising of multidrug-resistant pathogenic microorganisms and increasing occurrences of cross-microbial contamination have put more stress on the development of high efficient disinfectants [1,2,3]
Monodisperse hierarchical porous silica nanoparticles were synthesized through a soft-templating method [19]. hierarchical porous SiO2 (h-SiO2) nanoparticles were further surface functionalized with thiols by a post-synthesis grafting method
Elemental analysis was studied by energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) (Figure S3, SI), where oxygen and silicon peaks come from h-SiO2
Summary
The growing concern about potential health risk caused by the arising of multidrug-resistant pathogenic microorganisms and increasing occurrences of cross-microbial contamination have put more stress on the development of high efficient disinfectants [1,2,3]. Inspired by our research on exploring hierarchical porous silica for biopharmaceutical applications [23,24,25], we here develop a facile in situ precipitation approach to load 10 nm Ag3PO4 NPs onto the thiol modified hierarchical porous silica to generate the Ag3PO4@h-SiO2 and investigate their photocatalytic disinfection performance Such a unique structure possesses obvious advantages of high specific surface areas, high Ag3PO4 loading, reduced Ag3PO4 aggregation, better chemical and physical durability. The chosen pathogen was spread evenly on agar plates covered with small round filter disks carrying little volume (10 lL) of buffer solution and NP suspensions Those agar plates were left in dark/ visible light for 10 min and incubated overnight at 37 °C for observation. The critical point drying method was used to keep E. coli morphology [8, 18], and observed using SEM technology
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