Carbon nanofibers induced tunable oxygen vacancies on BiOCl for high efficient destruction of decontaminants

Abstract Construction oxygen vacancies (OVs) is a prominent strategy to promote photocatalytic properties. However, it is still a challenge to construct tunable OVs on photocatalysts by available and facile tactics. In this work, we fabricated novel flower-like carbon nanofibers (CNFs)/ BiOCl(BOC) composites with tunable OVs via carbon CNFs modification. BiOCl modified by CNFs possesses a higher {001} facets exposure ratio, which can reasily introduces abundant OVs on the surface of CNFs/BiOCl. The electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis confirm the tunable OVs exist on the CNFs/BiOCl composites, and OVs can be facilely controlled by adjusting the content of CNFs. Under visible light illumination, the photocatalytic destruction specific activity (Ks) of BOC-0.5 for the destruction of rhodamine B (RhB), tetracycline (TC), and phenol is 2.5 times, 4.3 times, and 5.6 times higher than that of BOC, respectively, and is 60.6 times, 4.5 times and 5.8 times of that of the commercial TiO2 (P25), respectively. Radical quenching experiments demonstrate that •O- 2 outbalances other radicals in photocatalytic degradation. Finally, the OVs-induced improvement mechanism for visible-light responsive photoactivity of flower-like CNFs/BiOCl was also discussed based on the experimental observations.