Abstract
Mesoporous LaFeO3 as a visible light-driven photocatalyst was prepared by a nanocasting method using mesoporous silica (SBA-15) as a hard template. The as-prepared LaFeO3 photocatalyst was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), N2 adsorption-desorption, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and optical absorption spectra. The characterization studies and experimental results showed that LaFeO3 with porous structure caused by the removal of SBA-15 hard template could enhance the specific surface area of the resulting photocatalyst, which improves the phenol adsorption ability of the photocatalyst and in turn enhances its photo-Fenton catalytic activity. The photo-Fenton catalytic activity of the photocatalyst was investigated by photo-Fenton degradation of aqueous phenol under visible light irradiation. The effects of catalyst dosage, H2O2 concentration, and solution pH on the photo-Fenton catalytic degradation of phenol using mesoporous LaFeO3 were studied and optimized. Under the optimal conditions of 20 mg L−1 phenol, 1.0 g L−1 catalyst, and 10 mM H2O2 at pH = 5, the photo-Fenton degradation of phenol (93.47%) was achieved in 180 min under visible light irradiation. Furthermore, our results proved the stability and reusability of mesoporous LaFeO3 and revealed its catalytic mechanism for the photo-Fenton degradation of phenol.
Highlights
Untreated wastewater released from many industries such as paper making; petrochemical, textile, and flavouring agents; and petroleum industry contains high phenol concentrations
Note that the small-angle X-ray diffraction (XRD) of LFO-RHT (the inset in Figure 1(b)) showed the diffraction peak that could be indexed to the lattice plane (100) of SBA-15
The peak intensity was much lower than that of SBA-15, it still confirmed the existence of the SBA-15 hard template which was not able to be completely removed by NaOH solution [29, 30]
Summary
Untreated wastewater released from many industries such as paper making; petrochemical, textile, and flavouring agents; and petroleum industry contains high phenol concentrations. As one of the commonly iron-contained perovskite oxides, LaFeO3 is considered as a promising visible lightdriven photocatalyst for the photo-Fenton degradation of organic pollutants [19, 23,24,25,26]. Erefore, many strategies have been developed to overcome this shortcoming by improving their surface area via several novel methods, including the modified sol-gel process [28], nanocasting strategy [29, 30], polystyrene added sol-gel [31], and biotemplate method [32] Of these methods, the nanocasting pathway using a hard template has attracted recent research interest due to its unique features such as controlled morphology and texture and highly crystallized walls of target materials [33]. To the best of our knowledge, no such work has been previously published
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