Abstract
Herein, we describe a simple and cost-effective design for the fabrication of a novel ternary RGO/BiOCl/TiO2 nanocomposites through a simple hydrothermal process. The prepared nanocomposites were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV–vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV–vis DRS) and N2 adsorption–desorption analysis. Organic contaminants—such as methylene blue (MB), methyl orange (MO), rhodamine B (RhB) and amido black-10B (AB-10B)—were employed as the target pollutants to evaluate the adsorption capacity and photocatalytic activity of RGO/BiOCl/TiO2 nanocomposites. From experimental data, it was also found that the amount of TiO2 impressed the photocatalytic performance, and the nanocomposites with 10% of TiO2 showed the best photocatalytic activity. The improved photocatalytic performance may be mainly due to the narrow band gap, and the charge separation and migration of RGO. Moreover, good recyclability was obtained from RGO/BiOCl/TiO2 nanocomposites, and scavenger tests indicated that photogenerated holes were the main active species in the reaction system. Therefore, the prepared RGO/BiOCl/TiO2 nanocomposites have broad applications foreground in pollutants purification.
Highlights
With the continuous development of modern industry, organic dyes are widely used in many fields, such as textiles, printing, and dyeing [1]
The results indicated that the incorporated graphene has a comprehensive effect on the adsorption and charge transfer kinetics of TiO2 -graphene nanocomposites, which endows the nanocomposites good photocatalytic reactivity and tunable photocatalytic selectivity in decomposing methyl orange (MO) and methylene blue (MB) in aqueous solution
The resulting sample was marked as reduced graphene oxide (RGO)/BiOCl/TiO2 -x%, where x% represents the theoretical content of TiO2 to the total amount of BiOCl and TiO2 in the nanocomposites
Summary
With the continuous development of modern industry, organic dyes are widely used in many fields, such as textiles, printing, and dyeing [1] Wastewater from these related industries is a significant source of water pollution. With growing demand for environmental purification of hazardous organic pollutants, traditional treatment methods—such as flocculation, adsorption, and biological technology—do not work efficiently because they are either slow or non-destructive to some and most persistent organic pollutants These methods involve expensive equipment, and have certain limitations in large-scale applications [2,4]. BiOBr-graphene nanocomposites were prepared by a simple and rapid solvothermal method, found that the resulting nanocomposites exhibited a superior performance on the photocatalytic removal of gaseous nitrogen monoxide than pure BiOBr under visible light irradiation [35]. The prepared ternary nanocomposites exhibit superior photocatalytic activity for the decomposition of several dyes
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