SnO2 aerogel deposited onto polymer-derived carbon foam for environmental remediation

Abstract

Carbon-based composite materials with high specific surface areas have drawn significant interest in photocatalytic wastewater treatment. Herein, a porous SnO2 aerogel@polymer-derived carbon (PDC) composite was fabricated via an emulsion polymerization followed by epoxide-assisted gelation approach. The enhancement of photocatalytic activity could be mainly attributed to the synergistic effect between the rutile and porous SnO2 aerogel and carbon, which was found to enhance the electron–hole separation, necessary to improve photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants. In addition, the SnO2 aerogel@PDC composite catalyst can be easily separated from dye solution without centrifugation and filtration due to its foam structure. In comparison with the pristine SnO2 aerogel, the SnO2 aerogel@PDC composite photocatalyst exhibited a substantial improvement in the photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue (MB) dye degradation under UV-light irradiation (~60% degradation vs. ~90% degradation, respectively). The photodegradation reaction of MB over the SnO2 aerogel@PDC composite photocatalyst under UV-light illumination shows pseudo-first-order kinetics, with a rate constant (k) almost 1.5-fold larger than that of the pristine SnO2 aerogel. This facile construction provides insights into designing new three-dimensional (3D) materials as photocatalysts.