Assembly of recyclable TiO2@AC/CTs through vdW-integrated strategy for photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic oxidation

Abstract

Thus far, recyclable photocatalysts for large-scale applications have hardly been developed because traditional chemical epitaxial growth is typically limited to materials with high lattice matching and processing compatibility. Therefore, photocatalytic degradation of pollutants suffers from dispersion and recycling of powdery photocatalysts from water. To address this issue, commercial P25 nanospheres are coated with amorphous carbon (AC) to form TiO₂@AC core–shell nanospheres, which physically integrate with commercial carbon textiles (CTs) through van der Waals (vdW) interaction to assemble flexible TiO₂@AC/CTs. These commercial materials are suitable for the industrial production of TiO₂@AC/CTs, which can greatly promote industrial applications of photocatalytic technology. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the photo-excited electron tends to transfer from TiO₂ to amorphous carbon, which significantly enhances the separation of an electron from a hole in the TiO₂@AC core–shell nanosphere. The photoelectrocatalysis of TiO₂@AC/CTs exerts unexpected performance through synergistic interactions of photocatalysis and electrocatalysis. TiO₂@AC/CTs achieve higher cycle stability than P25 during photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic processes and can address the issue of dispersion and recycling technique of particulate photocatalysts and significantly reduce the recycling cost. The assembly of amorphous carbon-coated P25 and CTs into vdW heterostructures through a vdW-integrated strategy can be a general rule to integrate other powdery photocatalysts with CTs to assemble recyclable carbon textile-based catalysts for industrial applications of photocatalysis and photoelectrocatalysis.