Room-temperature synthesis of flower-like BiOBr/Bi2S3 composites for the catalytic degradation of fluoroquinolones using indoor fluorescent light illumination

Abstract

In this study, BiOBr/Bi2S3 composite photocatalysts have been prepared at room temperature, using a facile, rapid and high yield production route. Various physiochemical techniques including XRD, FESEM, ATR-FTIR, XPS, UV–vis DRS, BET and PL were used to investigate the morphology, optical, electronic and crystalline properties of the as-synthesized composites. Subsequently, their photocatalytic abilities were determined by degrading ciprofloxacin (CIP) and ofloxacin (OFL) antibiotics under indoor fluorescent light illumination. The introduction of Bi2S3 resulted in the formation of BiOBr/Bi2S3 composites with enhanced photocatalytic performance, due to the better separation of photogenerated charge carriers and improved visible light absorption as compared to pristine BiOBr. Among all the BiOBr/Bi2S3 composites, higher performance was recorded using BiOBr/Bi2S3-60, which degraded 97.22% and 89.28% of CIP and OFL in 60 min. Moreover, the experimental data for the photocatalytic degradation of CIP and OFL using both pristine BiOBr and BiOBr/Bi2S3 composites were fitted into pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order kinetic models, and the data fitted well with the pseudo-first-order kinetic model.