WO 3 nanocubes: Hydrothermal synthesis, growth mechanism, and photocatalytic performance
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BUILDING HIERARCHICAL MATERIALS VIA PARTICLE AGGREGATION
WO3 nanocubes: Hydrothermal synthesis, growth mechanism, and photocatalytic performance Lili Wang1, Hanmei Hu2,a), Junchan Xu2, Sane Zhu1, Aiqin Ding1, Chonghai Deng1,b) 1
Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Hefei University, Hefei 230601, China Key Laboratory of Functional Molecule Design and Interface Process, Anhui Jianzhu University, Hefei 230601, China a) Address all correspondence to these authors. e-mail: [email protected] b) e-mail: [email protected] 2
Received: 7 March 2019; accepted: 13 May 2019
Regular WO3 nanocubes have been prepared on a large scale through a convenient hydrothermal route at the temperature of 200 °C. The products were characterized by powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), field-emission scanning electron microscopy, UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. A crystal growth process for WO3 nanocubes was simply proposed based on the comparative experiments. The band gap energy (Eg) was determined to be 2.58 eV based on the UV-vis DRS analysis, and the PL spectrum exhibited a strong blue light emission band centered at 469 nm. The as-prepared WO3 nanocubes showed higher visible light photocatalytic performance for degrading rhodamine B compared with WO3H2O and WO30.33H2O/WO3 which were obtained at 80 °C and 140 °C, respectively, suggesting potential application in the region of wastewater purification.
Introduction In recent years, industrial wastewater has already become one of the most critical environmental problems, which is endangering human health. Among various remediation technologies, photocatalytic degradation is more attractive because the pollutants in the water can be completely mineralized into carbon dioxide and water molecules [1, 2]. Semiconductor with two-dimensional (2D) nanostructure has been proved to be a promising nanomaterial for realizing efficient solar energy utilization in photocatalytic field owing to the abundant surface structure and the diffusion distance for the photoexcited electron–hole pairs moving to the photocatalyst surface was distinctly shortened [3, 4]. As an important n-type semiconductor with a band gap of 2.4–2.8 eV, WO3 has been used as a good visible right– responsive photocatalyst for O2 generation and the degradation of organic pollutants in the wastewater [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Due to the strong correlation between the photocatalytic activity and the microstructure of photocatalysts, studies on the shape controllable synthesis of WO3 photocatalysts have attracted a great interest. So far, many efforts have been made to synthesize nanostructured WO3 with various morphologies, such as nanorods [13], nanowires [14], ultra-thin nanosheets
ª Materials Research Society 2019
[15], nanoribbons [16], nanotubes [17], nanoplates [18], microspheres [19], WO3 nanostructure arrays [20], and carpet-like microflowers [21]. Although many achievements have come true, how to obtain the desired morphologies and sizes of WO3
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