Abstract
Photocatalytic nitrogen fixation and pollutants degradation at ambient temperature and pressure as a clean and efficient means represents a sustainable direction. In this paper, novel two-dimensional (2D) ZnIn2S4/2D BiOCl (ZIS/BOC) nanosheets heterostructures were successfully synthesized by in-situ solvothermal techniques. XPS and TEM results showed the formation of heterostructure. The photocatalytic properties of these materials were further studied by degradating phenol and nitrogen fixation under visible light irradiation. In particular, heterostructure obtained with a mass ratio of 0.5 wt % of ZnIn2S4 had a good application prospect and can achieve 77.4% phenol degradation rate within 6 h and a rate of ammonium production of 14.6 µmol∙gcat−1·h−1. The reaction rate of 0.5 wt % ZIS/BOC heterostructure exhibited 8.6 and 2.6 times relative to BiOCl for the degradation of phenol and nitrogen fixation, respectively. The enhanced photocatalytic activity was attributed to the collaboration of low recombination rate of photo-generated carriers and enhanced visible light absorption. Based on capture experiments and electron spin resonance (ESR) techniques, the main active species that may appear in photocatalytic systems were explored, and the corresponding photocatalytic mechanism was also proposed appropriately. This strategy will open up new ideas for the design and manufacture of more energy-efficient materials with high photocatalytic activity.
Highlights
Rapid economic development and improvement of technology have an important impact on human life and quality of life
The characteristic peaks of ZnIn2 S4 were not observed in the composite sample, which may be due to its low relative strength or content
The composite catalytic material contains six elements of Bi, Cl, O, S, In, and Zn can be seen from Figure 2e–j, the distribution of each element in the 0.5 wt % ZnIn2S4/2D BiOCl (ZIS/BOC) heterostructure is relatively uniform
Summary
Rapid economic development and improvement of technology have an important impact on human life and quality of life. BiOCl, as one of the representatives of ternary oxides, has a special anisotropic layered structure with the band gap width is about 3.2 eV, and has good photocatalytic performance under ultraviolet irradiation, which is a bismuth-based compound with low cost, easy preparation, stable structure, and no toxicity, and has recently attracted widespread attention [30,31,32,33]. Among many reported photocatalytic materials, ZnIn2 S4 is a direct band gap with band energy of 2.4–2.7 eV [40,41], has shown good visible light photocatalytic performance due to its unique structure and physical and chemical properties, and has overcome the disadvantage of easy corrosion of traditional sulfides. 2D/2D ZIS/BOC heterostructures were fabricated by in-situ solvothermal methods, and under the irradiation of visible light, photocatalytic reaction was used to degrade phenol and fix nitrogen. According to capture experiments and ESR techniques, the corresponding photocatalytic mechanism was proposed
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