Making Fe-Si-B amorphous powders as an effective catalyst for dye degradation by high-energy ultrasonic vibration

Abstract Synthetic dyes have caused serious ecological and environmental threats in our daily lives. Effective and inexpensive dye-degradation methods are desperately perused for decades. In this work, ultrasonic-vibration treatment is found as an effective approach that can dramatically improve the degradation performance of industrial Fe78Si9B13 amorphous powders towards methylene blue. As demonstrated by synchrotron X-ray nano-computed tomography and scanning electron microscope combined with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, the micro-channels on the surface or inside of Fe78Si9B13 particles offer a shortcut for fast mass transfer and supply plenty of reactive sites with low density and high energy due to the structural rejuvenation after ultrasonic vibration. It leads to the reduction of the reaction activation energy of degradation under the pseudo-first-order kinetic model and an exceptional decomposition capacity. Our work not only extremely drives down the current costs of wastewater treatments, but also provides a promising approach for tuning the effectivity of alloying catalysts via manipulating the potential energy state of metallic glasses based on the high-frequency mechanical vibration technique.