Oxygen vacancy regulation in Nb-doped Bi2WO6 for enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity

Hao Chen; Changteng Zhang; Ya Pang; Qianhong Shen; Yang Yu; Yuxuan Su; Jiabang Wang; Fang Zhang; Hui Yang

doi:10.1039/c9ra02862e

Oxygen vacancy regulation in Nb-doped Bi₂WO₆ for enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity

RSC Adv. 2019 Jul 22;9(39):22559-22566. doi: 10.1039/c9ra02862e. eCollection 2019 Jul 17.

Authors

Hao Chen¹, Changteng Zhang¹, Ya Pang¹, Qianhong Shen^{1

2}, Yang Yu¹, Yuxuan Su¹, Jiabang Wang¹, Fang Zhang², Hui Yang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University Hangzhou P. R. China 310027 21826027@zju.edu.cn s_qianhong@163.com.
² Zhejiang-California International NanoSystems Institute, Zhejiang University Hangzhou P. R. China 310058.

Abstract

Novel Nb-doped Bi₂WO₆ nanosheets have been successfully synthesized by a simple hydrothermal method. XRD, Raman spectra, XPS and SEM were adopted to analyze the structure and morphology of the samples, then the structure-dependent optical properties, photoelectric behavior and photocatalytic activities were investigated, and the structure-property relationship was also discussed. The results show that doping Nb⁵⁺ can increase the oxygen vacancies in the Bi₂WO₆ lattice and reduce the optical band gap of Bi₂WO₆. The oxygen vacancies also act as electron traps, which promote the separation of photogenerated carriers. Hence, compared with the pure Bi₂WO₆, the as-prepared Nb-doped Bi₂WO₆ nanosheets exhibit enhanced visible-light photocatalytic activity for removing contaminants in water such as rhodamine B and tetracycline.