Bitao Liu

Raspberrylike SiO2@reduced graphene oxide@AgNP composite microspheres with high aqueous dispersity and excellent catalytic activity.

The hybridizations of functional microspheres with graphene or graphene oxide (GO) sheets often suffer from severe agglomeration behaviors, leading to poor water dispersity of the resultant composite materials. Here, we first demonstrate that the sonication-assisted self-assembly of tiny GO sheets (whose lateral size less than 200 nm) on microspheric substrates like cationic polyelectrolyte-modified SiO2 microspheres could effectively overcome such a common drawback. On the basis of this facile strategy, we further developed reduced graphene oxide/silver nanoparticle composite film wrapped SiO2 microspheres, which not only possessed unique raspberrylike structure and high aqueous dispersity but also exhibited exceptional catalytic activity toward the reduction of 4-nitrophenol.

Preparation and Characterization of Mo Doped in BiVO4 with Enhanced Photocatalytic Properties

Molybdenum (Mo) doped BiVO4 was fabricated via a simple electrospun method. Morphology, structure, chemical states and optical properties of the obtained catalysts were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), N2 adsorption–desorption isotherms (BET) and photoluminescence spectrum (PL), respectively. The photocatalytic properties indicate that doping Mo into BiVO4 can enhance the photocatalytic activity and dark adsorption ability. The photocatalytic test suggests that the 1% Mo-BiVO4 shows the best photocatalytic activity, which is about three times higher than pure BiVO4. Meanwhile, 3% Mo-BiVO4 shows stronger dark adsorption than pure BiVO4 and 1% Mo-BiVO4. The enhancement in photocatalytic property should be ascribed to that BiVO4 with small amount of Mo doping could efficiently separate the photogenerated carries and improve the electronic conductivity. The high concentration doping would lead the crystal structure transformation from monoclinic to tetragonal phase, as well as the formation of MoO3 nanoparticles on the BiVO4 surface, which could also act as recombination centers to decrease the photocatalytic activity.