Hydrothermal synthesis of ZnSnO3 nanoparticles decorated on g-C3N4 nanosheets for accelerated photocatalytic degradation of tetracycline under the visible-light irradiation

Abstract

The construction of heterojunction photocatalysts is a significant tactic to facilitate efficient long-lasting photo-generated carriers’ separation, thus improving the photocatalytic performance of the single photocatalysts. In this paper, a multicomponent heterostructure photocatalyst was designed and prepared via a simply hydrothermal method, which was composed of the ZnSnO3 nanoparticles uniformly anchoring on the surface of g-C3N4 nanosheets. The structure and properties of ZnSnO3/g-C3N4 heterojunction photocatalysts were characterized utilizing series of characteristic techniques. Results displayed that introducing 2D g-C3N4 nanosheets not only acted as the support to disperse the ZnSnO3 nanoparticles to confine the aggregation of ZnSnO3 nanoparticles, but also improved the light absorption and the separation of the photogenerated carriers of ZnSnO3, which can positively increase the photocatalytic performance for the tetracycline (TC) degradation under visible light irradiation. And the highest photocatalytic activity was obtained by 10% ZnSnO3/g-C3N4 photocatalyst (85%, 120 min), which was up to nearly 9 times higher than g-C3N4. Accordingly, the corresponding photocatalytic reaction mechanism involving in the separation of the efficient charge carrier was investigated.