MoS2/Bi2S3 heterojunctions-decorated carbon-fiber cloth as flexible and filter-membrane-shaped photocatalyst for the efficient degradation of flowing wastewater

Traditional powder/film-shaped photocatalysts suffer some serious limitations (such as recycling difficulty or high-cost) in the degradation of flowing wastewater. Herein, we report a novel filter-membraneshaped photocatalyst by constructing MoS2/Bi2S3 heterojunctions on carbon-fiber cloth (CF/MoS2/Bi2S3 cloth). CF/MoS2/Bi2S3 cloth consists of carbon-fibers (diameter: similar to 15 mu m) which are decorated with numerous MoS2 nanosheets (thickness: similar to 2 nm) and Bi2S3 nanorods (length: 500-600 nm), and it exhibits a broad-spectrum photoabsorption from ultraviolet to near-infrared region (>1200 nm). Under visible-light irradiation, CF/MoS2/Bi2S3 cloth (area: 4 x 4 cm(2)) exhibits the highest photocurrent (similar to 1.44 mA cm(-2)) and can photocatalytically remove 95.1% rhodamine B (RhB), 91.8% methylene blue (MB), 74.5% tetracycline (TC) and 75.5% hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) after 100 min, better than those by CF/MoS2 cloth (37.0% RhB, 39.9% MB, 29.6% TC, 21.6% Cr(VI)) and CF/Bi2S3 cloth (26.9% RhB, 27.4% MB, 20.9% TC, 25.9% Cr(VI)). Importantly, when flexible CF/MoS2/Bi2S3 cloth (diameter: 10 cm) is used as the filter-membrane to degrade the flowing wastewater (rate: similar to 1 Lh(-1)), the removal efficiency of RhB increases from 19.7% at 1st to 94.6% at 8th filtering/degrading grade. Thus, CF/MoS2/Bi2S3 cloth has excellent potential as a novel filter-membrane-shaped photocatalyst to degrade the flowing wastewater. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.