Abstract
The combined pollution of heavy metals and organic pollutants in water body has become one of vital environmental issues. Herein, a series of BiVO4/rGO/g-C3N4 nanocomposites were synthesized for concurrent removals of organic pollutant and heavy metal. Results showed that using the optimized photocatalyst BiVO4/rGO/g-C3N4-28, tetracycline (TC) removal of 87.3% and copper (Cu (II)) removal of 90.6% were achieved under visible-light irradiation within 3 h, respectively; much higher than those using BiVO4 and g-C3N4. More importantly, synergistic effect of TC and Cu (II) removals occurred on the surface of BiVO4/rGO/g-C3N4 in the TC-Cu (II) coexistence condition. Additionally, the ·OH and ·O2ˉ were the most important active species for TC oxidation, while photogenerated electrons were the most responsible for Cu (II) reduction. Results of various characterizations and electron spin resonance test demonstrated that BiVO4/rGO/g-C3N4 was a Z-scheme photocatalyst. Based on the identified intermediates, possible degradation pathways and mechanisms for photocatalytic degradation of TC were proposed. This study advances the development and mechanism of photocatalysts for collaborative removal of pollutants.
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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
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Funding
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21707021), Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi (2020GXNSFAA297034), Open Fund of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Clean Pulp & Papermaking and Pollution Control (2019KF19), Special Fundings for Innovative Province Construction of Hunan Province (2019GK5011), and Research Project of Bosch Branch of Guangxi University Graduate School (GXU-BFY-2020–036).
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JS: investigation, methodology, validation, software, formal analysis, data curation, writing original draft. YR: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing—review and editing. YH: conceptualization, writing—review and editing, formal analysis, validation, project administration, funding acquisition. LT: data curation and validation. QW: visualization and validation. YM: investigation and validation. SZ: visualization and validation. ZL: validation. ZL: validation. ZY: resources. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Sun, J., Rong, Y., Hou, Y. et al. Synchronous removal of tetracycline and copper (II) over Z‑scheme BiVO4/rGO/g-C3N4 photocatalyst under visible-light irradiation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 19148–19164 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16996-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16996-4