Shape-controlled synthesis of varied bismuth nanostructures and their size-dependent photocatalytic removal of organic dyes under visible light irradiation

Abstract

The catalytic activity of photocatalyst is strongly dependent on the phase structures, grain size and particle morphology of the catalyst. In this paper, the controlled synthesis of bismuth(Bi) with different morphologies (nanoparticles, nanorods, nanocubes and micro-spheres) has been successfully realized by adjusting different experimental parameters. The Bi nanostructures were analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), photoluminescence (PL), UV–vis absorption spectroscopy (UV–Vis). The PL spectra shown that the reduction of the size of Bi nanomaterials can decrease the recombination rate of photoelectrons and holes, which leads to the effective separation of photocharge carriers and the better photocatalytic performance of Bi nanomaterials. The energy gaps of Bi nanoparticles, nanorods, nanocubes and microspheres are 2.57 eV, 2.69 eV, 2.99 eV and 3.16 eV respectively. The degradation activity of Bi nanostructures with different sizes on organic dyes showed that 99.9%, 98.9%, 97% and 68.3% degradation of RhB was observed after 90-min visible light irradiation for Bi nanoparticles (20–50 nm), nanorods (20 nm in diameter and 1 μm in length) nanocubes (150–200 nm) and micro-spheres (10 μm), respectively. The results indicated that if the grain sizes of the Bi samples are reduced from micro-size to nano-size, their catalytic activities dramatically increase. At the same time, the achieved results also reveal that Bi2O3 and BiOCl were found in Bi surfaces before and after catalytic degradation, which was confirmed by XPS and FTIR technology. In addition, the catalytic activity of Bi with the same morphology increased with the decrease of pH value. Furthermore, the Bi samples still retained excellent catalytic activity after 40 cycles, the removal rate could also reach 73.5% for the 40th cycling.