Single metal atom oxide anchored Fe3O4-ED-rGO for highly efficient photodecomposition of antibiotic residues under visible light illumination

Abstract Designing highly efficient photocatalysts is significantly important to degrade the harmful pollutions in water. In this study, photocatalyst of Fe3O4-ED-rGO with dissolved HPV was successfully prepared and electron microscopy characterization revealed that large number of single tungsten/vanadium atom oxide (ST/VAO) was homogeneously deposited on Fe3O4 nanoparticles in SMAO-MrGO-ED sample and occupied the bivalent Fe2+ sites. Meanwhile, phase analysis confirmed that the Fe3O4 nanocomposites were mostly conversed from the reducted Fe2O3 by the hydrolysis of rGO-ED-HPV. Such a highly dispersed monatomic adsorption on the bivalent Fe2+ of polycrystalline SMAO-MrGO-ED nanocomposite not only benefits for the visible light absorption from 2.7 eV to 2.10 eV, but also offers abundantly active sites to get the highest activity of 98.43% and 98.12% for ciprofloxacin (CF) and ibuprofen (IBF) photodegradation, respectively. All these discoveries give us a new insight to design the photocatalysts with high photodegradation efficiency, low cost, short reaction time and good reusability.