Facile fabrication and photocatalytic performance of WO3 nanoplates in situ decorated with Ag/β-Ag2WO4 nanoparticles

In this work, we first successfully designed and fabricated the ternary plasmonic Ag/beta-Ag2WO4/WO3 photocatalysts with different contents of Ag/beta-Ag2WO4 particles in situ decorated on the surface of WO3 nanoplates by a simple precipitation method at room temperature condition. The photocatalytic activity of as-prepared samples was investigated by degradation of rhodamine B (RhB), methylene blue (MB) and methyl orange (MO) under visible-light irradiation. It was found that the prepared 40 wt% Ag/beta-Ag2WO4/WO3 photocatalyst showed the highest photocatalytic RhB efficiency with 83.21 and 86.83 times higher than those of pure WO3 and Ag/beta-Ag2WO4 samples, respectively. The highly enhanced photocatalytic performance was attributed to the Z-scheme mechanism in this ternary composites, in which Ag particles play a crucial role by the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) effect; meanwhile, Ag particles also can work as the charge transmission-bridge, giving rise to effectively restraining recombination of the photogenerated charge carriers. This novel ternary Ag/beta-Ag2WO4/WO3 nanostructures may provide an appropriate insight in the consideration as an ideal candidate in environmental remediation.