MoS2/Bi2S3 heterojunctions-decorated carbon-fiber cloth as flexible and filter-membrane-shaped photocatalyst for the efficient degradation of flowing wastewater

Abstract Traditional powder/film-shaped photocatalysts suffer some serious limitations (such as recycling difficulty or high-cost) in the degradation of flowing wastewater. Herein, we report a novel filter-membrane-shaped photocatalyst by constructing MoS 2 /Bi 2 S 3 heterojunctions on carbon-fiber cloth (CF/MoS 2 /Bi 2 S 3 cloth). CF/MoS 2 /Bi 2 S 3 cloth consists of carbon-fibers (diameter: ∼15 μm) which are decorated with numerous MoS 2 nanosheets (thickness: ∼2 nm) and Bi 2 S 3 nanorods (length: 500–600 nm), and it exhibits a broad-spectrum photoabsorption from ultraviolet to near-infrared region (>1200 nm). Under visible-light irradiation, CF/MoS 2 /Bi 2 S 3 cloth (area: 4 × 4 cm 2 ) exhibits the highest photocurrent (∼1.44 mA cm −2 ) and can photocatalytically remove 95.1% rhodamine B (RhB), 91.8% methylene blue (MB), 74.5% tetracycline (TC) and 75.5% hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) after 100 min, better than those by CF/MoS 2 cloth (37.0% RhB, 39.9% MB, 29.6% TC, 21.6% Cr(VI)) and CF/Bi 2 S 3 cloth (26.9% RhB, 27.4% MB, 20.9% TC, 25.9% Cr(VI)). Importantly, when flexible CF/MoS 2 /Bi 2 S 3 cloth (diameter: 10 cm) is used as the filter-membrane to degrade the flowing wastewater (rate: ∼1 L h −1 ), the removal efficiency of RhB increases from 19.7% at 1st to 94.6% at 8th filtering/degrading grade. Thus, CF/MoS 2 /Bi 2 S 3 cloth has excellent potential as a novel filter-membrane-shaped photocatalyst to degrade the flowing wastewater.