Abstract
The key to utilize the solar energy is the performance of the photocatalyst. This work presents an in situ controlled hydrothermal method for the prepared a series of Fe-doped h-CeO2 hollow micro-spheres (X% Fe/h-CeO2), where the dopant confers enhanced activity to the material. The micro-morphology and structure were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), x-ray diffraction (XRD). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis confirmed the Fe doped in the prepared microspheres with different states. The photocatalytic performance of X% Fe/h-CeO2 samples were fully been investigated for photodegradation of RhB under visible light irradiation and showed greatly improvement of the degradation efficiency. More specifically, 0.25% Fe/h-CeO2 achieved enhanced RhB degradation efficiency, which was 2 times than that of pure h-CeO2. This enhancement was attributed to the reduced band gap and the doping-reduced charge recombination as conformed by the N2 adsorption-desorption spectra and the Mott-Schottky curves respectively. The surface area of the as-prepared micro-spheres can be obviously increased by the BET. Finally, first-principle density functional (DFT) calculations confirmed that the band gap was reduced after Fe-doping, contributing to increased overlapping degree of electronic orbits.
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