A facile and green synthesis route towards two-dimensional TiO2@Ag heterojunction structure with enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity

A facile and green route to the two-dimensional (2D) TiO2@Ag heterojunction structure has been developed for improving the visible light photocatalytic activity. The edible corn crispy was selected as the biomass template to fabricate 2D-TiO2@Ag heterojunction composites. The various analytical and spectroscopic methods including SEM, TEM, XRD, XPS, and FT-IR were employed to investigate the structure of the composites. The results show that Ag nanoparticles were evenly incorporated within the 2D-TiO2, and the increase of calcination temperature would make the interaction of Ag nanoparticles and 2D-TiO2 strong. Moreover, the introduction of Ag and a heterojunction structure could expand the visible light absorption region for composites. Based on the comparison of photocatalytic activity, it turns out that the 2D-TiO2@Ag composites can exhibit an improved significantly photocatalytic activity for methylene blue (MB) under visible light irradiation, which can be attributed to the retarding of the charge recombination and accelerating the electron transfer from the 2D-TiO2 to metal Ag. The 2D-TiO2@Ag heterojunction structure also has effective applications in solar conversion.