Natural Cotton Cellulose-Supported TiO2 Quantum Dots for the Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Degradation of Dyes

Hancheng Shen, Weiwei Zhang, Chunyun Guo, Jing Zhu*, Junjie Cui, Zhonghua Xue*, Peirong Chen*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    10 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    The artificial photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants has emerged as a promising approach to purifying the water environment. The core issue of this ongoing research is to construct efficient but easily recyclable photocatalysts without quadratic harm. Here, we report an eco-friendly photocatalyst with in situ generated TiO2 quantum dots (TQDs) on natural cotton cellulose (CC) by a simple one-step hydrothermal method. The porous fine structure and abundant hydroxyl groups control the shape growth and improve the stability of nanoparticles, making natural CC suitable for TQDs. The TQDs/CC photocatalyst was synthesized without the chemical modification of the TQDs. FE-SEM and TEM results showed that 5–6 nm TQDs are uniformly decorated on the CC surface. The long-term stability in photocatalytic activity and structure of more than ten cycles directly demonstrates the stability of CC on TQDs. With larger CC sizes, TQDs are easier to recycle. The TQDs/CC photocatalysts show impressive potential in the photocatalytic degradation of anionic methyl orange (MO) dyes and cationic rhodamine B (RhB) dyes.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number3130
    JournalNanomaterials
    Volume12
    Issue number18
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Sep 2022

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51702004, and 22105002), Anhui Agricultural University (rc382003), the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization (No.SKLTOF20190119), Innovation and Entrepreneurship Plan for College Students, National scientific research project (S202010364087), the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy (DNL), CAS, DNL Cooperation Fund, CAS (DNL180402), State Key Laboratory of Catalysis (N-21-12) and the Open Fund of The State Key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics in DICP, CAS, China.

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2022 by the authors.

    Keywords

    • cotton cellulose
    • degradation
    • dyes
    • photocatalysis
    • TiO quantum dots

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Chemical Engineering
    • General Materials Science

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