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Photocatalytic properties of BiOBr/BiOCl/AgBr ternary photocatalysts for degradation of RhB dye

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Abstract

Photocatalytic technology is a green technology using solar energy, which plays an important role in environmental protection. Bismuth compound BiOX (X = Cl, Br) is an excellent wide band gap semiconductor photocatalytic material but a greatly limited absorption of visible light. Silver bromide has strong photosensitivity but poor photocatalytic performance due to the serious recombination of photoelectron-hole pairs and the potential reaction between photoelectrons and silver ions. In this work, a series of BiOBr/BiOCl/AgBr ternary composite photocatalysts with excellent photocatalytic performance is synthesized by coprecipitation, and its photodegradation property in catalytic degradation of rhodamine B (RHB) dye under visible light irradiation is investigated. The results show that BiOBr/BiOCl/AgBr ternary heterojunction is successfully prepared experimentally, and the BiOBr/BiOCl/AgBr nanocomposites with 20 % molar fraction of AgBr (molar ratio of BiOBr/BiOCl =1:1) exhibits the best photocatalytic performance, its rate is 3.6 times of BiOCl, 3.1 times of BiOBr, and 55.9 times of AgBr. The formation of S-scheme heterojunction effectively reduces the recombination of photoelectron-hole pairs, resulting in a significant improvement in the photocatalytic performance of the ternary composite catalyst.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was financially supported by Zhejiang provincial key R&D program (No. 2019C01088) and a joint project (No. KYY-HX-20220850).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310014, China

    Xiao-hua Zheng, Wei Chen, Meng-nan Xu, Chen-bin Cai & Fang-er Yang

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  1. Xiao-hua Zheng
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  2. Wei Chen
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  3. Meng-nan Xu
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  4. Chen-bin Cai
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  5. Fang-er Yang
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Contributions

Xiao-hua Zheng was involved in the investigation and conceptualization. Wei Chen was involved in the writing and original draft. Meng-nan Xu was involved in the data curation and writing – review and editing. Chen-bin Cai was involved in the data curation and writing – review and editing. Fang-er Yang contributed to the resources and writing – review and editing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Fang-er Yang.

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Zheng, Xh., Chen, W., Xu, Mn. et al. Photocatalytic properties of BiOBr/BiOCl/AgBr ternary photocatalysts for degradation of RhB dye. J Nanopart Res 25, 96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-023-05748-9

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