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Enhanced photocatalytic activity of direct Z-scheme Bi2O3/g-C3N4 composites via facile one-step fabrication

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Abstract

Coupling oxidation type semiconductors is a feasible strategy to improve the photocatalytic activity of reduction type g-C3N4 photocatalysts. In this work, Bi2O3 was used as an oxidation type semiconductor to construct direct Z-scheme Bi2O3/g-C3N4 photocatalysts by a one-step calcination method. The obtained Bi2O3/g-C3N4 composites exhibited excellent photocatalytic activity and stability toward methylene blue degradation under visible light irradiation. The composite with 1% weight content of Bi2O3 to g-C3N4 exhibited the highest photocatalytic activity with an apparent rate constant of 0.063 min−1, which was 3.0 and 3.7 times higher than that of pure Bi2O3 and g-C3N4, respectively. The enhanced photocatalytic activity of the Bi2O3/g-C3N4 composite was mainly attributed to the improved charge separation efficiency and stronger redox ability. This work gave a new insight in developing g-C3N4-based Z-scheme heterojunction photocatalysts with enhanced photocatalytic activity.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the NSFC (51402025 and 51172031). Also, this work was financially supported by the Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (16B027) and Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2018JJ2456).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Energy and Power Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410111, People’s Republic of China

    Shuilian Liu & Jianlin Chen

  2. Hunan Key Laboratory of Applied Environmental Photocatalysis, Changsha University, Changsha, 410022, People’s Republic of China

    Difa Xu, Xiangchao Zhang & Mengyao Shen

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  1. Shuilian Liu
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  2. Jianlin Chen
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  3. Difa Xu
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  4. Xiangchao Zhang
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  5. Mengyao Shen
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Correspondence to Jianlin Chen or Difa Xu.

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Liu, S., Chen, J., Xu, D. et al. Enhanced photocatalytic activity of direct Z-scheme Bi2O3/g-C3N4 composites via facile one-step fabrication. Journal of Materials Research 33, 1391–1400 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2018.67

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