Facile synthesis of low crystalline BiOCl-based thermally-responsive photocatalyst with enhanced catalytic performance for photodegrading rhodamine B solution

Based on the superior photocatalytic activity of low crystalline BiOCl (LCB) and temperature responsive character of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), the novel BiOCl/GO@PNIPAM photocatalyst (PGOB) was successfully synthesized in this work by employing LCB as a photocatalytic core material, graphene oxide (GO) as a carrier for LCB, and PNIPAM as a thermo-sensitive shell material of the photocatalyst. Compared with the high crystalline BiOCl nanoplates (NPB), the core material LCB in PGOB exhibited superior photocatalytic activity and could be prepared simply by a mannitol complexation-assisted method under ambient conditions without any post-treatment. The interactions between mannitol and bismuth caused changes in chemical environment of bismuth in LCB. The morphology, crystallization, structure features and chemical compositions of the as-prepared samples were investigated by various techniques. The results showed that the prepared PGOB sample exhibited good temperature-responsive performance, excellent adsorption capacity and superior photocatalytic activities, the higher activity of which could be attributed to the effective separation and longer survival of the photogenerated carriers. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.