Synthesis of Ag and AgCl co-doped ZIF-8 hybrid photocatalysts with enhanced photocatalytic activity through a synergistic effect

Recently, Ag/AgCl composites with different structures have been widely studied and used as photocatalysts to degrade dye pollutants, due to their high separation efficiency of electron-hole pairs under visible light irradiation. Herein, we adopted a nucleation, precipitation, growth and photoreduction method to prepare Ag and AgCl co-doped ZIF-8 hybrid photocatalysts and explored the influence of Ag content on their physical and chemical properties. All as-prepared samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) measurements, energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), UV-vis diffuse reflectance and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). XRD indicated that ZIF-8 and AgCl were formed and some of the AgCl was reduced into Ag-0 after 30 min of UV light irradiation. SEM and TEM images verified that Ag/AgCl nanoparticles were inlaid in the body of ZIF-8 and Ag ions could hinder the growth of the ZIF-8 crystal. BET data indicated that Ag/AgCl nanoparticles did not alter the pore size of ZIF-8. The UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectra showed that Ag/AgCl@ZIF-8 has excellent ability to absorb visible light, indicating the high efficiency of the electron-hole pair separation of Ag/AgCl@ZIF-8. Finally, the photocatalytic activities of all of the as-synthesized samples were evaluated by degradation of RhB under visible light irradiation. Ag and AgCl co-doped ZIF-8 hybrid photocatalysts exhibited high photocatalytic activity due to the synergistic effect of ZIF-8, AgCl and Ag. After 60 min of visible light irradiation, Ag/AgCl(15)@ZIF-8 exhibited the best photocatalytic activity and could degrade 99.12% RhB, which was higher than Ag/AgCl (94.24%) and ZIF-8 (5.17%). Additionally, a photocatalytic mechanism for dye pollutant degradation over the Ag and AgCl co-doped ZIF-8 hybrid photocatalysts was proposed.