Silver particle on BiVO4 nanosheet plasmonic photocatalyst with enhanced photocatalytic oxidation activity of sulfadiazine

Abstract Herein, we successfully prepared decahedral BiVO4 at low temperature and formed BiVO4 nanosheet (S-BiVO4) by changing the morphology of surfactant addition, then fabricated a series of Ag/S-BiVO4 plasmonic photocatalysts by photo-deposition method. The photocatalytic activity of the sulfadiazine solution was investigated by irradiation in visible light, among which Ag/4S-BiVO4 (The mass ratio between AgNO3 and S-BiVO4 nanosheet is 1:4) had the highest photocatalytic performance. The degradation rate of Ag/4S-BiVO4 photocatalyst can reach the highest 91.31% within 4 h of visible light irradiation, which is about 1.78 and 2.95 times as high as that of S-BiVO4 (51.39%) and BiVO4 (30.96%), respectively. The excellent degradation activity may be summarized as the SPR effect induced by silver nanoparticles, which enhances the absorption in the visible light region and effectively promotes the separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. This result has also been verified by UV–Vis diffuse reflection and fluorescence spectroscopy. In addition, XRD and Raman spectroscopy show that the synthesized samples have monoclinic structure. FDTD simulation results confirm the surface plasmon resonance and electric field enhancement caused by silver nanoparticles. The active species of ·O2− and h+ are pivotal in photocatalytic oxidation of sulfadiazine solution. Furthermore, the material has good light stability and recyclability.