Novel mesoporous graphitic carbon nitride modified PbBiO2Br porous microspheres with enhanced photocatalytic performance

Sustainable mesoporous graphitic carbon nitride (mpg-C3N4) modified PbBiO2Br porous microsphere (mpg-C3N4/PbBiO2Br) had been successfully synthesized via solvothermal process. Multiple techniques were applied to explore the structure, morphology, optical and electronic properties of the as-prepared photocatalysts. It could be found that the mpg-C3N4 was uniformly distributed on the surface of the PbBiO2Br porous microsphere. Compared with the pure PbBiO2Br, the mpg-C3N4/PbBiO2Br exhibited superior photocatalytic activity for the degradation of organic pollutants under visible light irradiation. When the mass fraction of mpg-C3N4 was 3%, the mpg-C3N4/PbBiO2Br composite materials exhibited the highest photocatalytic performance. The results indicated that the introduction of mpg-C3N4 could effectively enhance the electron mobility to promote the catalytic activity. The enhanced photocatalytic activity of the mpg-C3N4/PbBiO2Br materials can be attributed to the stronger optical trapping capability and the more effective separation efficiency of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. During the process of photocatalysis, the main active species of the photocatalysts were determined to be the O-2(-) and hole under visible light irradiation. Based on the relative band positions of mpg-C3N4 and PbBiO2Br, a possible photocatalytic mechanism of mpg-C3N4/PbBiO2Br composite catalyst was proposed. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.