Facile one-pot synthesis of a BiOBr/Bi2WO6 heterojunction with enhanced visible-light photocatalytic activity for tetracycline degradation

Photocatalytic removal of tetracycline (TC) from the wastewater is of great value in the chemical and environmental engineering field. Here, we introduced a facile one-step method for the synthesis of BiOBr/Bi2WO6 heterojunctions by using cheap CTAB as the Br source. We showed the possibility of our method to fine-tune the content of BiOBr in the produced BiOBr/Bi2WO6 by simply changing the dosage of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), providing a platform for the delicate tuning of the visible-light absorbance ability of the composites. With a suitable heterojunction structure of BiOBr/Bi2WO6-0.2, it exhibited an ultrarapid photocatalytic activity towards TC (20 mg center dot L-1), with a competitive removal effi-ciency of 88.1% within 60 min and an ultrahigh removal rate of 0.0349 min-1. It could also be robustly recycled for at least 5 cycles with slight removal efficiency loss. We demonstrated that this exciting pho-tocatalytic performance was due to the highly decreased recombination of photoinduced electrons and holes on our composites by constructing this heterojunction structure, and the resulting center dot OH and .O-2 con-tributed to the effective degradation of TC to CO2.(c) 2022 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.