Photoelectrochemical water splitting coupled with degradation of organic pollutants enhanced by surface and interface engineering of BiVO4 photoanode

Antibiotic resistance has become a global problem as indicated by the worldwide emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria, which makes it an urgent demand to develop effective technologies for antibiotics removal from pharmaceutical wastewater. In this work, simultaneously removing antibiotic tetracycline from wastewater coupled with pure H-2 generation has been successfully achieved through PEC technique by using F-doped BiVO4@NiFe-LDH (F-BiVO4@NiFe-LDH) core-shell photoanode. The maximum photocurrent density of the F-BiVO4@NiFe-LDH photoanode at 1.23 V vs. RHE is about 6-fold that of the pristine BiVO4 photoelectrode. Furthermore, the composite photoanode was effectively applied to the PEC degradation of tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH), superior to the reported results. An experimental-computational combination study reveals that the synergistic effect between F doping and NiFe-LDH simultaneously improves the light absorption, charge separation and charge injection efficiency of BiVO4. This work presents a sunlight-driven, efficient and sustainable method for water splitting to produce hydrogen and new insights into wastewater treatment.