Recoverable and reusable visible-light photocatalytic performance of CVD grown atomically thin MoS2 films

The decomposition of water pollutants including industrial dyes and chemicals via photocatalytic decontamination is one of the major investigated problems in recent years. Two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) layers have shown great promise as an efficient visible-light photocatalyst owing to its numerous active sites and large surface area. In this study, atomically thin MoS2 films of different thicknesses from monolayer to five-layer and ten layers were fabricated on sapphire substrates using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). We demonstrate that these MoS2 thin films can be used as a photocatalyst to degrade Methylene Blue (MB) dye and can be recovered completely with utmost structural and chemical stability. Under visible-light irradiation, the MB absorption peak completely disappears with similar to 95.6% of degradation after 120 min. We also demonstrate the reusability of the MoS2 thin films without significantly losing the photocatalytic activity even after 5-cycles of degradation studies. The chemical and structural stability of the MoS2 films after 5-cycles of degradation studies were affirmed using various spectroscopic studies. Our findings suggest that the MB degradation efficiency increases from 19.01% to 98.46% with an increase in pH from 4 to 14. Our approach may facilitate a further design of other transition metal dichalcogenides-based recoverable photocatalysts for industrial applications.

Automated summary

This study fabricated atomically thin MoS2 films of different thicknesses and demonstrated their effectiveness and stability as photocatalysts for degrading dyes. Under visible-light irradiation, the degradation rate of MB dye can reach up to 95.6%, and the thin films show high photocatalytic activity after 5 degradation cycles.