Controlling dominantly reactive (010) facets and impurity level by in-situ reduction of BiOIO3 for enhancing photocatalytic activity

In-situ reduction method was successfully taken out to control the highly reactive (010) facets and decline band gaps in interlining-I/BiOIO3. It gave a fairly easy way to coordinate the control of bandgap engineering and structural engineering. The interlining-I provided an impurity level served as a plate for photo-generated electron to hop, which expanded the light reaction intensity and displayed excellent photocatalytic performance as well. The as-prepared samples were characterized and estimated for removing gas-phase Hg. It demonstrated that there existed an optimization of I- to construct a suitable impurity level for effectively separating and transferring electron-hole pairs. The corresponding structural engineering made the internal electric field(IEF) intensify, which was attributed to its increasing exposed surface in favor of obstructing their recombination in the bulk, generating a large number of essential species related to the larger exposed (010) facets to oxidize Hg into Hg2+ under visible light. BI-1 showed the highest efficiency of 92.15%. However, because of the existence of light corrosion, a small part of the iodine ions may be oxidized to elemental iodine to volatilize, fortunately it could be regenerated to the original efficiency in the same preparation method. In addition, the samples with super photocatalytic properties and excellent electron transport properties also gave out a capacious prospect in CO2 conversion, hydrogen evolution, NO removal, degradation of organic pollutants, also the super capacitors and batteries.