Synthesis And Characterization Of BiOCl Nanoplate And BiOCl-Based Composites

With the rapid development of modern society, the environmental pollution and energy crisis become the two major problems facing humanity. Photocatalytic technologies has been one of the concerns with its full use of the sun energy, low cost, pollution-free for environment, which has potential application in photodegrade organic pollutants, produce hydrogen via water-splitting by means of the redox reactions of the photogenerated electrons and holes. However, the conventional photocatalytic materials still have many problems such as the low quantum efficiency and difficult to be recovered have become primary obstacles for further application. The novel highly active energy-efficient light catalytic materials had become an important issue, including multiple metal oxide materials.Therefore, attention was paid to BiOCl as a new photocatalyst because of its unique crystal structures and electronic band structures. In our work, some BiOCl samples with different morphologies were synthesized via hydrothermal and hydrolysis method with Bi(NO3)3as the starting materials, and other means to analyze and their phase structure, specific surface area, the energy band structure, surface morphology and photocatalytic ability were characterized using XRD, UV-Vis, SEM, photocatalytic measurement. The results show that photocatalyst prepared by hydrothermal method shows special anisotropic growth along {001} faces, and showed the more regulation, smaller and the higher performance than catalyst prepared by hydrolysis.The graphene-based semiconductor photocatalysts have attracted extensive attention because graphene has many novel physical properties, such as excellent mobility of charge carriers at room temperature, high thermal conductivity, extremely high theoretical specific surface area and so on. In this works, a series of composites of the high photoactivity of {001} facets exposed BiOCl and graphene sheets (GS) were synthesized via a one-step hydrothermal reaction. The obtained BiOCl/GS composites photocatalysts were characterized by XRD, Raman spectroscopy, SEM, TEM, UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. The as-prepared BiOCl/GS composites photocatalyst showed enhanced photocatalytic activity for the degradation of MO under UV and visible light irradiation (λ>400nm). The enhanced photocatalytic activity could be attributed to oxygen vacancies of the {001} facets of BiOCl/GS composites, dye-sensitized photocatalytic degradation process and the high migration efficiency of photo-induced electrons, which could suppress the charge recombination effectively.