Abstract
Cu2O p-type semiconductor hollow porous microspheres have been prepared by using a simple soft-template method at room temperature. The morphology of as-synthesized samples is hollow spherical structures with the diameter ranging from 200 to 500 nm, and the surfaces of the spheres are rough, porous and with lots of channels and folds. The photocatalytic activity of degradation of methyl orange (MO) under visible light irradiation was investigated by UV-visible spectroscopy. The results show that the hollow porous Cu2O particles were uniform in diameters and have an excellent ability in visible light-induced degradation of MO. Meanwhile, the growth mechanism of the prepared Cu2O was also analyzed. We find that sodium dodecyl sulfate acted the role of soft templates in the synthesis process. The hollow porous structure was not only sensitive to the soft template but also to the amount of reagents.
Highlights
Much attention has been focused on fabricating highefficiency photocatalytic materials, which is one of the most potential routes to mitigating environmental pollution [1]
Metal oxide semiconductors, such as ZnO and TiO2, have attracted much attention owing to their high efficiency in the degradation of wide-ranged pollutants in which electron–hole pairs are generated under irradiation and degrade the pollutants absorbed on the surface of the photocatalytic materials [2,3,4,5]
The average crystalline grain size of the sample was calculated from the X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) patterns according to the Scherrer formula (Dhkl = kλ / βcosθ, where D is the average crystalline grain size, k is the Scherrer constant related to the shape and index of the crystals, λ is the wavelength (0.154056 nm) of the X-ray, θ is the Blagg diffraction angle, and β is the full-width at half-maximum)
Summary
Much attention has been focused on fabricating highefficiency photocatalytic materials, which is one of the most potential routes to mitigating environmental pollution [1]. Metal oxide semiconductors, such as ZnO and TiO2, have attracted much attention owing to their high efficiency in the degradation of wide-ranged pollutants in which electron–hole pairs are generated under irradiation and degrade the pollutants absorbed on the surface of the photocatalytic materials [2,3,4,5]. Most of the metal oxide semiconductors have large band gaps, for example, 3.2 eV for ZnO [6] and 3.0 eV for TiO2 [7], which are in the range of an UV spectrum For this kind of materials, it is hard to generate electron–hole pairs under visible light irradiation because of the low photo energy, which leads to lower photocatalytic efficiency and limits their large-scale applications. The optical properties and photocatalytic activities under visible light irradiation were investigated
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