Abstract
A novel ultrathin g-C3N4 nanosheet-modified BiOCl hierarchical flower-like plate heterostructure (abbreviated as BC/CN) was constructed via a thermal polymerization of urea precursor followed with hydrolysis route. The as-prepared samples were well characterized by various analytical techniques. The morphological observation showed that hierarchical flower-like BiOCl nanoplates were discretely anchored on the surface of ultra-thin C3N4 nanosheets. The photocatalytic performance of the as-prepared photocatalysts was evaluated by degradation of methylene blue (MB) under visible-light irradiation. The results showed that BC/CN photocatalyst exhibited enhanced photostability and photocatalytic performance in the degradation process. On the basis of experimental results and the analysis of band energy structure, it could be inferred that the enhanced photocatalytic performance of BC/CN photocatalyst was intimately related with the hybridization of hierarchical flower-like BiOCl nanoplates with ultrathin g-C3N4 nanosheets, which provided good adsorptive capacity, extended light absorption, suppressed the recombination of photo-generated electron–hole pairs, and facilitated charge transfer efficiently.
Highlights
Environmental pollution and energy crisis are becoming a highly serious threat to humanity’s existence and development, while photocatalysis is promising to be one of the most economic and ecologically safe approaches for settling the above-mentioned problems
Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3 N4 ), a polymeric metal-free n-type semiconductor with an indirect narrow bandgap of 2.7 eV, has become a hotspot in photocatalysis due to its facile synthesis, high thermal and chemical stability, excellent optical characteristics and low cost, it has been extensively studied as a visible light driven photocatalyst for organic pollutant photodegradation and hydrogen production from water photo-splitting [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]
Based on the consideration mentioned above, provided that 266 dimensional (2D) BiOCl nanoplates combine with g-C3 N4 ultrathin nanosheets to form plate-on-sheet heterostructure with large surface contact, this novel p-n BC/CN heterostructure photocatalyst is promising to exhibit significantly enhanced visible light photoactivity for degrading pollutants
Summary
Environmental pollution and energy crisis are becoming a highly serious threat to humanity’s existence and development, while photocatalysis is promising to be one of the most economic and ecologically safe approaches for settling the above-mentioned problems. Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3 N4 ), a polymeric metal-free n-type semiconductor with an indirect narrow bandgap of 2.7 eV, has become a hotspot in photocatalysis due to its facile synthesis, high thermal and chemical stability, excellent optical characteristics and low cost, it has been extensively studied as a visible light driven photocatalyst for organic pollutant photodegradation and hydrogen production from water photo-splitting [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]. Based on the consideration mentioned above, provided that 2D BiOCl nanoplates combine with g-C3 N4 ultrathin nanosheets to form plate-on-sheet heterostructure with large surface contact, this novel p-n BC/CN heterostructure photocatalyst is promising to exhibit significantly enhanced visible light photoactivity for degrading pollutants.
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