Biofabricated BiOI with enhanced photocatalytic activity under visible light irradiation

Seema Garg; Mohit Yadav; Amrish Chandra; Sameer Sapra; Soniya Gahlawat; Pravin P Ingole; Zsolt Pap; Klara Hernadi

doi:10.1039/c8ra05661g

Biofabricated BiOI with enhanced photocatalytic activity under visible light irradiation

RSC Adv. 2018 Aug 14;8(51):29022-29030. doi: 10.1039/c8ra05661g.

Authors

Seema Garg¹, Mohit Yadav^{1

2}, Amrish Chandra³, Sameer Sapra⁴, Soniya Gahlawat⁴, Pravin P Ingole⁴, Zsolt Pap^{5

6}, Klara Hernadi⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Amity Institute of Applied Sciences, Amity University Sector-125 Noida 201313 Uttar Pradesh India sgarg2@amity.edu.
² Amity Institute of Nanotechnology, Amity University Sector-125 Noida 201313 Uttar Pradesh India.
³ Amity Institute of Pharmacy, Amity University Sector-125 Noida 201313 Uttar Pradesh India.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Hauz Khas New Delhi 110016 India.
⁵ Nanostructured Materials and Bio-Nano-Interfaces Center, Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Bio-Nano-Sciences, Babes,-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca 400271 Romania.
⁶ Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Szeged Tisza Lajos krt. 103 H-6720 Szeged Hungary.
⁷ Department of Applied and Environmental Chemistry, University of Szeged Rerrich tér 1 H-6720 Szeged Hungary.

Abstract

In the recent past, there has been a large-scale utilization of plant extracts for the synthesis of various photocatalysts. The biofabrication technology eliminates the usage of harmful chemicals and serves as an eco-friendly approach for environmental remediation. Herein, a comparative analysis between bismuth oxyiodide synthesized via Azadirachta indica (neem) leaf extract (BiOI-G) and without leaf extract (BiOI-C) has been envisaged. The BiOI-G and BiOI-C samples were characterized by spectral and microscopic techniques, which revealed that the Azadirachta indica assisted BiOI-G attained enhanced features over BiOI-C such as narrower band gap, large surface area, porosity, increased absorption range of visible light and effectual splitting of the photogenerated e^--h⁺ pairs. Benefiting from these enhanced features, BiOI-G degraded methyl orange (MO), rhodamine B (RhB), and benzotriazole (BT) at a significantly higher rate in comparison to BiOI-C. The degradation rate of MO, RhB and BT by BiOI-G was observed to be 1.3, 1.25 and 1.29 times higher in comparison to BiOI-C. Moreover, BiOI-G displayed high stability upto five cycles of the photocatalytic activity, which endow its effectiveness as a highly-efficient green photocatalyst.