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Facile construction of BiOI/Nb2O5 heterojunction films and their excellent photocatalytic activity

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Abstract

A conventional hydrothermal method followed by a facile immersion method is used to prepare BiOI/Nb2O5 heterojunction films on the wire mesh made of stainless steel. The results show that sea urchin-like Nb2O5 nanospheres of orthorhombic structure and hierarchical flower-like BiOI with a tetragonal crystal type were formed in the preparation. BiOI and Nb2O5 combined firmly at the micron and nanoscale. They have formed heterojunctions. The optical measurements show that the heterojunction formation markedly extended the visible light absorption wavelength range even to 600 nm. The optical band gap values of the BiOI/Nb2O5 heterojunction films were decreased from 3.05 to ~ 1.63 eV. PL spectra revealed the heterojunction formation significantly inhibited the recombination of photogenerated electron–hole pairs. The electrochemical testing suggests that the photocurrent density of the BiOI/Nb2O5 heterojunction films is nine times that of the individual Nb2O5 film at most. It means that the heterojunction observably improved the separation efficiency of photogenerated charges. Based on the above strategy, the photocatalytic activity in degrading RhB dye in an aqueous solution was enhanced by 6.2 times at most. When the immersion number was 12, the heterojunction film exhibited the most excellent photocatalytic activity. A possible mechanism of photocatalytic performance improvement was also discussed.

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Funding

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51404170), Tianjin Enterprise Science & Technology Commissioner Project (Grant No. 21YDTPJC00450), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BK20201467) and Scientific Research Funding Project of “333 High-level Training Project” of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BRA2020260). The authors also thank sci-go Co., Ltd. and zkbaice.Co., Ltd. for their professional materials characterization and analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin Key Lab of Integrated Design and On-Line Monitoring for Light Industry & Food Machinery and Equipment, Tianjin, 300222, People’s Republic of China

    Rong Jia, Liang Hao & Jiankang Wang

  2. College of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University of Science & Technology, No. 1038, Dagu Nanlu, Hexi District, Tianjin, 300222, People’s Republic of China

    Rong Jia, Liang Hao & Jiankang Wang

  3. Tianjin International Joint Research and Development Center of Low-Carbon Green Process Equipment, Tianjin, 300222, People’s Republic of China

    Rong Jia, Liang Hao & Jiankang Wang

  4. College of Materials Science and Hydrogen Energy Engineering, Foshan University, No. 18, Jiangwanyilu, Foshan, 528000, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Te Hu

  5. School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangsu Ocean University No. 59, Cangwulu, Haizhou District, Lianyungang, 222005, People’s Republic of China

    Yiqiang He

  6. Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Chiba University, No. 1-33, Yayoi-Cho, Inage-Ku, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan

    Yun Lu

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  1. Rong Jia
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  2. Liang Hao
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Contributions

RJ: Formal analysis, Data curation. LH: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writting—orginal draft, Writting—review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. TH: Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. YH: Visualization, Investigation, Data curation. JW: Visualization, Software. YL: Visualization, Conceptualization, Software, Validation.

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Correspondence to Liang Hao.

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Jia, R., Hao, L., Hu, T. et al. Facile construction of BiOI/Nb2O5 heterojunction films and their excellent photocatalytic activity. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 34, 2268 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-023-11700-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-023-11700-3

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