Abstract
WO3/C3N4 porous nanotubes (WO3/CNNT) with direct Z-scheme heterojunction have been developed through an effortless one-pot calcination self-assembly strategy. The synthesized WO3/CNNT heterojunction structure is different from conventional bulk g-C3N4 according to field-emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) spectra analysis, and has a better performance in photocatalytic degradation of pollutants. It is under a unique structure with an elevated interfacial area and high dispersion active sites, which can facilitate the degradation of some dye pollutants and antibiotics by heterojunctions, higher than that of bulk g-C3N4 and hollow g-C3N4 nanotubes. The photocatalytic experimental results indicated the optimum photocatalyst of the 2% WO3/CNNT sample with a BET surface area of 108.8 m2/g, which can rapidly remove Rhodamine B (RhB) and tetracycline (TC) up to 97.4% and 87.4%, respectively, under visible-light irradiation, which was about 3.4 and 83.8 times higher than that of individual CNNT and WO3 for RhB degradation. Additionally, the degradation of TC was around 1.1 and 14.3 times superior to that of individual CNNT and WO3. Furthermore, the porous WO3/CNNT heterojunction turned out to be stable and reusable after four cycles of experiments. Reactive free radical trapping experiments confirmed that holes (h+) and superoxide (·O2−) radicals are the most dominant species during photodegradation. Finally, a possible Z-scheme catalytic mechanism is proposed. In this work, some new insights are provided to design novel Z-scheme g-C3N4-based heterojunction photocatalysts with a porous nanotube structure and enhanced photocatalytic performance for high-efficiency degradation of dyes and antibiotics.
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Acknowledgments
This job is financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (Nos. 2008085QE277, 2208085QE137), the Natural Science Foundation of Education Department of Anhui Province (Nos. KJ2021A1018, KJ2021A0940), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52075144) and the Graduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project of Hefei University (No. 21YCXL39).
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HQ: writing—original draft, data curation; JL: resources; LG: investigation; ZZ: software; JZ: software; ZX: visualization; SW: software; TY: visualization; HL: validation; KH: funding acquisition; ML: methodology; JX: conceptualization, supervision, methodology.
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Qian, H., Lu, J., Ge, L. et al. One-Pot Construction of Porous WO3/g-C3N4 Nanotubes of Photocatalyst for Fast and Boosted Photodegradation of Rhodamine B and Tetracycline. J. Electron. Mater. 52, 3947–3962 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-023-10387-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-023-10387-w