Abstract
The development of noble metal-anchored semiconductors for photocatalytic processes is now garnering interest for potential application to toxic pollutants as well as antibiotic degradation. Herein, we report novel Ag@p-g-C3N4–Bi2MoO6 nanocomposites synthesized by facile hydrothermal and calcination methods with a size of about 50 nm, exhibiting superior photocatalytic activity for charge separation. The resulting nanocomposites were evaluated by various physiochemical techniques such as X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. The charge transfer photogenerated carriers were confirmed by photoluminescence spectra and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. The anchoring of Ag nanoparticles over p-g-C3N4/Bi2MoO6 decreased the band gap energy from 2.67 to 2.48 eV, to exhibit an abnormal increase in absorption of light towards the visible light region. The degradation performance of the nanocomposites in terms of antibiotic ciprofloxacin and rhodamine B degradation efficiency was measured 85 and 99.7% respectively. The superoxide radical anion ˙O2− played a significant role throughout the entire degradation process. Focusing on the probable mechanism based on the desirable results, the present work follows the heterostructure mechanism. Moreover, this work features the feasible applications of Ag@p-g-C3N4–Bi2MoO6 as a modified photocatalyst in the treatment of both domestic and industrial waste water.
Highlights
There is a great demand for natural resources worldwide mainly due to environmental degradation and pollution.[1]
At regular intervals of 10 min, an aliquot of 4 mL was extracted at a particular time a er visible light irradiation and the concentration of cipro oxacin (CIP) antibiotic and rhodamine B (RhB) dye was determined by measuring the absorbance corresponding to their respective wavelengths of 278 and 554 nm that was analyzed by a UV-visible spectrophotometer (Specord-200 plus UV-visible spectrophotometer, Germany)
We developed a simple and environmentally friendly approach of using a ternary photocatalyst, Ag@p-gC3N4/Bi2MoO6, for environmental contaminant degradation
Summary
There is a great demand for natural resources worldwide mainly due to environmental degradation and pollution.[1]. Paper applications in materials chemistry due to its exible physical and chemical properties and tunable electronic structure, showing outstanding potential for visible-light active photocatalysis.[19,20] Besides this, g-C3N4 contains abundant functional groups such as carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), which augment the material properties to boost its broad speci c area housing active absorption sites for organic pollutants.[21,22] there have been few attempts on investigating noble metals anchored on heterojunction semiconductors to reduce the band gap energy. A er being dried at room temperature the obtained product was washed with deionized water and absolute ethanol about three times and dried in a hotair oven for 6 h at 80 C. It was further annealed in a muffle furnace at 300 C for 3 h (temperature ramp rate: 5 C minÀ1)
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