Study of the Photodeposition of Noble Metal On BiOCl for the Photocatalytic Decomposition of Rhodamine B

Study of the photodeposition of noble metal on BiOCl for the photocatalytic decomposition of Rhodamine B

Liang Kong¹, Zheng Jiang^1,2, Tiancun Xiao¹, Henry H.-C. Lai¹, Peter P. Edwards¹

1. Department of Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, OX1 3QR, U. K.
2. Jesus College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3DW, U. K.

The noble-metal/semiconductor heterostructures attracted great interests in the field of photocatalytic solar energy conversion because of the unique interaction between metal and semiconductor support, such as plasmonic effects, electron trapping effects, etc¹. Bismuth oxyhalides have recently emerged as excellent photocatalysts. On the basis of our previous work concerning semiconductor composites², the interaction of noble metals and semiconductor BiOCl were further investigated by using the key characterisations.

In this work, an effective photo-deposition method was adopted to prepare the noble metal-modified BiOCl photocatalysts. All the as-prepared samples showed excellent activity in decomposing typical refractory organic pollutants under UV-light irradiation. XPS spectra revealed that the surface supported noble metal species are in metallic states and the surface deposited noble metal significantly enhances the absorbance of the corresponding catalysts in the visible-light region. Though the noble metal deposition declines the activity of photodegradation of Rh. B on the modified catalysts under UV light irradiation, it improves the stability of BiOCl under long-term light exposure. The working mechanism has been proposed based on the band structure. 

1.            E. Khon, A. Mereshchenko, A. N. Tarnovsky, K. Acharya, A. Klinkova, N. N. Hewa-Kasakarage, I. Nemitz and M. Zamkov, Nano Letters, 2011, 11, 1792-1799.

2.            L. Kong, Z. Jiang, T. Xiao, L. Lu, M. O. Jones and P. P. Edwards, Chemical Communications, 2011, 47, 5512-5514.