Structure-induced highly selective adsorption and photocatalytic pollutant degradation performance of BiOBr

Abstract

By adjusting the ratio of deionized water and anhydrous ethanol in the precursor solution, BiOBr catalysts with different structures from flat nanosheets to spherical nanoflowers were successfully fabricated by hydrothermal process, and the structure induced highly selective adsorption and photocatalytic degradation performance are investigated in details. The results show that these BiOBr exhibit high selective adsorption capacity of cationic dyes (RhB: 98.6% in 20 min). And also, based on such adsorption prerequisite, the achieved adsorption-photocatalytic degradation efficiency could be 99.0% for MO (20 mg L−1, 30 min), 98.7% for RhB (40 mg L−1, 10 min), 93.5% for TC (60 mg L−1, 30 min) with the corresponding degradation rate of 8.4594 h−1, 29.6682 h−1 and 4.6278 h−1, respectively, being even more efficient than that of BiOBr-based composite catalysts in literatures. The mechanism of the adsorption and the improved photocatalytic degradation are analyzed in details. This study would be in favor of further boosting the photocatalytic application efficiencies of BiOBr-based catalysts.