Cu2O nanoparticles decorated BiVO4 as an effective visible-light-driven p-n heterojunction photocatalyst for methylene blue degradation

Bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) is a chemically stable and nontoxic semiconductor (SC) photocatalyst that can absorb visible light to degrade most of pollutants in aqueous solution due to suitable band-gap energy (ca. 2.4 eV), but it usually shows a low activity in its pristine form owing to poor charge-separation characteristics and the weak surface adsorption properties. In this paper, we demonstrated that the photocatalytic activity of BiVO4 can be greatly enhanced by surface modification with Cu2O nanoparticles through polyol reduction method. The modified photocatalysts (Cu2O/BiVO4) with proper loading amount of Cu2O (0.75 wt%) showed the highest photocatalytic degradation activity for methylene blue (MB) degradation with the pseudo-first-order rate constant k(app) and degradation efficiency two times higher than pristine BiVO4 under visible light and solar light irradiation. The characterizations of resulting photocatalysts revealed that decoration of Cu2O nanoparticles led to the formation of a p-n heterojunction at the contact interface of Cu2O and BiVO4, which narrowed the band gap of BiVO4 for extending the absorption range of visible light and promoted the charge transfer across interface for suppressing the recombination of photogenerated electron hole pairs, thus improving the catalytic performance of photocatalysts. This work demonstrates that the structural integration of p-type Cu2O SC with n-type BiVO4 SC will be a new promising strategy to develop a high-efficient heterojunction photocatalyst for visible-light-driven degradation of pollutants. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.