One-step hydrothermal fabrication of erythrocyte-like ZnS/ZnO composite with superior visible light photocatalytic performance

Abstract

One-step hydrothermal approach was utilized to synthesize erythrocyte-like ZnS/ZnO composite under the pH condition of 9, which are assembled with ZnO and ZnS nanoparticles. By contrast experiments, it is found that the pH value greatly affects the chemical component of hydrothermal products, and pure ZnS microspheres can be obtained when the pH value decreases to 3. Compared with the pure ZnS and commercial ZnO, the ZnS/ZnO composite exhibits dramatically improved photocatalytic activities for the degradation of tetracycline (TC) (77.2%) under the visible light irradiation. In the cycling experiments, the ZnS/ZnO composite is also proved to show nice photostability and good photocatalytic activity for 5 runs.