Hybrid high-porosity rice straw infused with BiVO<inf>4</inf> nanoparticles for efficient 2-chlorophenol degradation

Abstract

© 2018 The American Ceramic Society In this work, the coupling of BiVO4 nanoparticles with a highly porous material derived from rice straw (BiVO4/RS composites) and the photocatalytic degradation of 2-chlorophenol (2-CP) in an aqueous solution was studied. The results indicated that BiVO4/RS composites possessed a monoclinic structure. The morphologies of BiVO4/RS composites consisted of spherical shapes of BiVO4 particles coated on the RS adsorbent. The specific surface area of BiVO4 increased from 1.9024 to 31.1153 m2/g after coating with RS adsorbent. A shift occurred in adsorption edge from 510 to 525 nm, corresponding to a reduction in band gap energy from 2.43 to 2.35 eV. The change in the optical adsorption edge and band gap of BiVO4/RS composites may simultaneously result to the duplication of a structure caused by silicon species in rice straw, which was expected to be self-doped into the BiVO4 crystal lattice during synthesis. The photocatalytic performance of 2-chlorophenol under visible irradiation clearly showed that BiVO4/RS composites displayed the highest photocatalytic activities in comparison with other pure samples, which were 2 times higher than that of BiVO4.