Study on the design and photocatalytic performance of TiO2@g–C3N4–Ag/Ag2O ternary heterojunction nanomaterials

Abstract

In this work, we designed and prepared the TiO2@g–C3N4–Ag/Ag2O (TCNA) ternary nanoparticle materials in a simple and low-cost hydrothermal method, in which, small Ag/Ag2O nanoparticles were uniformly distributed on a layer of thin g-C3N4 nanosheets coated TiO2 nanospheres. By carefully changing the ratios of surface distributed Ag/Ag2O nanoparticles, the photocatalytic degradation performance of the prepared TCNA can be easily changed. Under the modified catalytic device, we found that a high degradation rate of about 99% at 90 min in degrading RhB can be obtained by TCNA-2 reached, which is 4.7 and 3.6 times higher than the photodegradation rate constants of pure TiO2 and TiO2@g-C3N4 composites, respectively. Furthermore, the prepared TCNA nanomaterials also showed high photocatalytic stability and good cycling properties. The scavengers study indicated that the ·O2− and ·OH were the main active groups of the obtained ternary photocatalysts. Subsequently, we proposed a suitable mechanism for exposing the high photocatalytic performance of our TCNA ternary nanomaterials, which may have a positive influence on the design and preparation of other high-performance ternary photocatalytic nanomaterials.