Ternary heterojunctions catalyst of BiOCl nanosheets with the {001} facets compounded of Pt and reduced graphene oxide for enhancing photocatalytic activity

The photocatalytic activity of BiOCl have begun to attract much attention, and it is essential to construct a highly active BiOCl photocatalyst applicable to photocatalytic degradation for water purification. Here we reported a facile and novel fabrication of the ternary Pt-BiOCl/rGO hybrid photocatalysts and the photocatalyst was characterized by XRD, Raman, SEM, TEM, BET, XPS and PL. The characterization results prove that the Pt nanoparticles and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) is not only favorable to red shift of the absorption edge, but also could collect and transfer the electrons originated from BiOCl with exposed {001} facets, consequently enhance the separation efficiency of charges. Moreover, photocatalysis activity towards dye degradation under simulated solar irradiation reveal the Pt-BiOCl/rGO photocatalysts exhibits the highest significant efficiency among all samples for the RhB photodegradation, which is almost 1.3 times higher than that of pristine BiOCl. We further study the effect of dye concentration and effect of catalyst concentration under irradiation. We used the trapping experiment and total organic carbon (TOC), to explore the RhB degradation mechanism. The trapping experiment revealed that superoxide radicals (O2·−) play a crucial role during the catalytic process. Based on the above research, we speculate that the excellent catalytic performance of Pt-BiOCl/rGO is attributed to the special ternary structure of the catalyst, which enable us conveniently to design and fabricate highly photoactive functional materials applicable to photocatalysis and solar energy conversion.