Abstract
In this work, hierarchical hollow BiOBr submicrospheres (HBSMs) were successfully prepared via a facile yet efficient solvothermal strategy. Remarkable effects of solvents upon the crystallinities, morphologies, and microstructures of the BiOBr products were systematically investigated, which revealed that the glycerol/isopropanol volumetric ratio played a significant role in the formation of hollow architecture. Accordingly, the underlying formation mechanism of the hollow submicrospheres was tentatively put forward here. Furthermore, the photocatalytic activities of the resulting HBSMs were evaluated in detail with photocatalytic degradation of the organic methyl orange under visible light irradiation. Encouragingly, the as-obtained HBSMs with striking recyclability demonstrated excellent visible-light-responsive photocatalytic performance, which benefits from their large surface area, effective visible light absorption, and unique hollow feature, highlighting their promising commercial application in waste water treatment.
Highlights
In recent years, semiconductor photocatalysis has gradually been recognized as a promising approach to effectively solve the ever-increasing energy shortage and environmental pollution [1, 2]
No characteristic peaks for other impurities can be detected, indicating that phase-pure BiOBr can be obtained with the three solvent systems
Compared to the hollow BiOBr submicrospheres (HBSMs) and BiOBr-IP, the wide diffraction peaks of the BiOBr-GC imply its smaller crystal size and/or poor crystallinity, which should be associated with the high viscosity of the used GC (∼934 μPas at 20°C), much higher than that of IP (2.37 μPas)
Summary
Semiconductor photocatalysis has gradually been recognized as a promising approach to effectively solve the ever-increasing energy shortage and environmental pollution [1, 2]. Numerous pioneer researches have proved that the photocatalytic activities of a semiconductor are hugely dependent upon its size, configuration, and shape [6, 7]. In this context, the specific microstructures of photocatalysts have been tuned finely to improve their photocatalytic activities [8,9,10]. With the overviews above in mind, we first scalably prepared hollow BiOBr submicrospheres (HBSMs) by using a simple solvothermal method, where the di-ndecyldimethylammonium bromide (DDAB) acts as Br source and the mixed glycerol (GC)/isopropanol (IP) as the solvent. The underlying formation mechanism of the HBSMs as well as their photocatalytic degradation mechanism for the dye MO was tentatively shed light upon here
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