Rational Electron Transmission Structure in an Ag2O/TiO2(anatase-B) System for Effective Enhancement of Visible Light Photocatalytic Activity

Titanium dioxide has received great attention as a photocatalyst. However, due to the relatively large bandgap energy of TiO2 and fast recombination of photogenerated electron–hole pairs, various attempts have been made to improve its photocatalysis, including reasonable energy band construction for broadening light absorption and effectively separating photogenerated electron–hole pairs. In this work, a reasonable energy band construction is realized by an Ag2O/TiO2(anatase-B) heterostructure system. The Ag2O/TiO2(anatase-B) microspheres aggregated by radially aligned nanosheets are synthesized by a one-step sol–gel solvothermal method. The Ag2O nanoparticles are uniformly coated on TiO2(anatase-B) microspheres with a diameter of 2.5–4.5 μm. Compared with P25 and TiO2(anatase-B), the photocatalytic activity of the Ag2O/TiO2(anatase-B) heterostructure is obviously enhanced under visible-light irradiation with the degradation of methyl orange. The photocatalytic mechanism of Ag2O/TiO2(anatase-B) microspher...