Highly porous activated carbon with a large surface area and pore volume was synthesized by KOH activation using commercially available activated carbon as a precursor. By modification with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), highly porous activated carbon showed superhydrophobicity with a water contact angle of 163.6°. The changes in wettability of PDMS‐ treated highly porous activated carbon were attributed to the deposition of a low‐surface‐energy silicon coating onto activated carbon (confirmed by X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy), which had microporous characteristics (confirmed by XRD, SEM, and TEM analyses). Using an easy dip‐coating method, superhydrophobic activated carbon‐coated sponges were also fabricated; those exhibited excellent absorption selectivity for the removal of a wide range of organics and oils from water, and also recyclability, thus showing great potential as efficient absorbents for the large‐scale removal of organic contaminants or oil spills from water.
Although semiconductor
photocatalysis has made great progresses
as a promising solution to solve the problem of environmental pollution,
the highly efficient decomposition of organic pollutants driven by
sunlight is still a challenge. Herein, we successfully constructed
a Z-scheme photocatalyst BiOCl-Au-CdS for the first time by stepwise
deposition of Au and CdS. It was found that the Au nanoparticles (NPs)
were selectively anchored on the {001} facets of BiOCl nanosheets
in the process of photoreduction while CdS NPs were further in situ
deposited on Au NPs via the strong S–Au interaction. Compared
to BiOCl, BiOCl-Au, and BiOCl-CdS, the Z-scheme BiOCl-Au-CdS exhibited
evidently higher sunlight-driven photocatalytic activity toward the
degradations of anionic dye Methyl Orange, cationic dye Rhodamine
B, colorless pollutant phenol, and antibiotic sulfadiazine. The radical
trapping experiments indicated that ·OH, h+, and ·O2
– are the main reactive species responsible
for the degradations of organic pollutants over BiOCl-Au-CdS. Based
on the photoelectrochemical measurements, PL spectra, and band potential
calculation, it can be concluded that the Z-scheme structure of BiOCl-Au-CdS
not only retains the photogenerated electrons and holes with higher
redox ability but also decreases their recombination rate. As a highly
efficient sunlight driven photocatalyst, BiOCl-Au-CdS can be potentially
used in environmental pollutant remediation.
We report a growth of p-CuO nanowire arrays with a simple thermal oxidation and a fabrication of nanowire-based heterojunctions by coating the p-CuO nanowire arrays in an n-ZnO layer through a thermal decomposition method. Their optoelectronic properties and photovoltaic performance were investigated. Compared with the conductance in the dark, a 154% increase in photoconductance was obtained under a white light illumination of 100 mW/cm2. The heterojunctions exhibit an obvious photocurrent increment of 0.264 mA under the illumination of 141 mW/cm2. After annealing the heterojunctions at 100°C for 25 min, a larger open-circuit voltage of 0.37 V was obtained, the short-circuit current density increase to 0.63 mA/cm2 from original 0.49 mA/cm2. The overall power conversion efficiency is 0.1%.
Aligned CuO nanowires (NWs) were synthesized by a simple cost-effective oxidation method. They act as cores; high density CuO/ZnO core/shell heterostructure NWs were fabricated by thermal decomposition. Using the core/shell heterostructure NWs as a photoelectrode, a 0.71% photo-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency was obtained from photoelectrochemical water decomposition.
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