One-pot twelve tungsten phosphate acid assisted electrochemical synthesis of WO3-decorated graphene sheets for high-efficiency UV-light-driven photocatalysis

In this work, WO3/graphene nanocomposite (WO3/GN) was prepared via an easy and scalable approach to decorate WO3 particles on the graphene sheets from a graphite electrode by twelve tungsten phosphate acid assisted electrochemical exfoliation. The samples were fully characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transformation infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The photocatalytic performance of the samples was investigated by the decomposition of the methylene blue (MB) under UV light irradiation, which is low power compared with previous published articles. The samples exhibited high degradation rate (up to 80%). (C) 2014 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.