Fabrication of TiO2@Yeast-Carbon Hybrid Composites with the Raspberry-Like Structure and Their Synergistic Adsorption-Photocatalysis Performance

In the present work, we report the preparation and photocatalytic properties of TiO2@yeast-carbon with raspberry-like structure using a pyrolysis method. The products are characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermal gravimetric and differential thermal analysis (TGA-DTA), Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and ultraviolet visible spectroscopy (UV-VIS), respectively. The results show that the hybrid TiO2@yeast-carbon microspheres have ordered elliptic shapes of uniform size (length = 3.5 +/- 0.3 mu m; width = 2.5 +/- 0.5 mu m). UV-VIS ascertains that the as-prepared microspheres possess an obvious light response in a wide range of 250-400 nm. In the decomposition of typical model pollutants including methylene blue and congo red, the hybrid composites exhibited excellent photocatalytic activity for the methylene blue due to the enhanced adsorption ability. Further investigation reveals that the combined effect of adsorption from the yeast-carbon core and photocatalytic degradation from the attached TiO2 nanoparticles were responsible for the improvement of the photocatalytic activities. Hereby, the raspberry-like TiO2@yeast-carbon has promising applications in water purification.