Porous BiVO₄Nanofibers: Electrospinning Fabrication And Enhanced Visible Light Photocatalytic Activity Investigation

As the energy crisis and environmental problems is getting worse, people need tofind a new environmental energy to represent for the traditional unrenewable、energy-extensive and pollutional energy such as coal and oil. The development andapplication of photocatalysts provide an effective way to deal with the problem. Inrecent years the visible photocatalyst of BiVO4gets more and more attention becauseof its excellent photocatalytic property. It includes three structures; monoclinicscheelite, tetragonal scheelite and tetragonal zircon. Among all these structures, themonoclinic scheelite has the narrowest band gap of about2.4eV and gets the bestphotocatalytic property. In this article, the electrospinning method was used in thefabrication of the BiVO4photocatalyst to investigate its morphology，band structure，and photocatalytic property. The work mainly divided in three parts:(1) The BiVO4gel fibers were successfully prepared by electrospinningtechnology. In the fabrication process, the PVP was added as thespinning-assistant agent. The influences of the amount of PVP and HNO3tothe gel fibers preparation were investigated. In addition, the soft-templateagent P123was added to observe its influence on the structure of BiVO4.(2) The researches on the phase and microstructure of the BiVO4gel fibers andnanofibers under different temperature calcination were testified by XRD、SEM、TEM、Raman、UV-VIS characterization. The obtained BiVO4nanofibers have more porous structure、 bigger surface areas than theconventional preparation of BiVO4. Besides, the band gap of the BiVO4nanofibers get widen, it provide an efficient method for the water solardegradation.(3) The photocatalytic property experiment was carried out under visible lightusing the MB as the photodegradation agent. From the result, it wasconfirmed the BiVO4nanofibers have a higher photocatalytic efficiency. Itis because the bigger surface area induces more photo acceptation andorganic compound absorption. The one-dimensional fiber structure canaccelerates the hole-electron transportation. (4) The composition, micro-structure and photocatalytic property of thesuspension particles were investigated. With the photocatalytic propertycompared to the nanofibers, we analyze the formation mechanism of thesuspension.