Facile and enlargeable preparation of piezocatalytic CaCO3 for efficient degradation of organic dyes.

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Piezoelectric catalysis has emerged as a promising green technology for implementing pollutant degradation and H2O2 production. The use of environment friendly and abundantly available piezocatalysts is critical for practical applications. This work presents the preparation of various morphological CaCO3 via a simple precipitation method in the absence or presence of different templates. The piezoelectric force microscopy (PFM) characterization demonstrates that the porous CaCO3 has excellent piezoelectric activity, which also demonstrates its efficient production of H2O2 and degradation of organic dyes. A production rate of H2O2 of 331μmolg-1·h-1 and a degradation rate of 0.22535 min-1 for 5mg/L Rhodamine B (RhB) were achieved under conventional ultrasonic agitation. The mechanistic investigations along with the H218O control experiment revealed that the piezocatalytic production of H2O2 mainly follows the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) pathway. Furthermore, this research work has successfully achieved the large-scale preparation of CaCO3, and the properties of the prepared CaCO3 remain stable during the expansion of the preparation scale. Considering the simple, cost-effective and readily-scale-up preparation, the piezocatalytic CaCO3 should have a great potential for the degradation of organic dyes.