Photocatalytic activities of hollow and hierarchical Bi3.15Nd0.85Ti3O12 microspheres synthesized through a hydrothermal process

Abstract

Hollow and hierarchical Bi3.15Nd0.85Ti3O12 (BNdT) microspheres of 0.5–1.2 μm in diameter were synthesized through a hydrothermal process. Each hollow microsphere is constructed across by many single-crystalline BNdT nanoplates with in-plane dimension of ~400 nm. The BNdT nanoplates are of layered perovskites. The UV–visible absorption characteristics demonstrated that the band gap of the BNdT microspheres is 3.33 eV. The hierarchical microspheres exhibit significant photocatalytic activity. Up to 75% methyl orange was decolorized after UV irradiation for 210 min, whereas lower than 10% methyl orange decolorized using BNdT powders prepared from single crystals as catalyst. The photocatalytic decolorization of methyl orange solution is a pseudo-first-order reaction and its kinetics can be expressed as ln(C/C 0) = kt.