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Environmentally benign chitosan as reductant and supporter for synthesis of Ag/AgCl/chitosan composites by one-step and their photocatalytic degradation performance under visible-light irradiation

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Abstract

A novel Ag/AgCl/chitosan composite photocatalyst was successfully prepared by a simple one-step method. During this progress, environmentally benign chitosan not only served as reductant to reduce Ag+ to Ag0 species, but also acted as supporter for Ag/AgCl nanoparticles. XRD, SEM, EDX, UV-vis DRS and XPS were employed to characterize the as-prepared simples. SEM images of Ag/AgCl/chitosan composites revealed that Ag/AgCl nanoparticles were successfully loaded onto chitosan without obvious aggregation. All Ag/AgCl/chitosan composites exhibited efficient photocatalytic activity for the degradation of rhodamine B (RhB) under visible-light irradiation. The result of photocatalytic degradation experiment indicated that 20% of the mass ratio of AgCl to chitosan was the optimum, and after 40 min photocatalytic reaction, the degradation rate reached about 96%.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported financially by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 21367022 and 51662036) and Bingtuan Innovation Team in Key Areas (2015BD003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Shihezi University/Key Laboratory of Green Processing for Chemical Engineering/Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region/Engineering Research Center of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering of Xinjiang Bingtuan, Shihezi, 832003, China

    Hao Wang, Yuhan Wu, Pengcheng Wu, Shanshan Chen, Xuhong Guo, Guihua Meng, Banghua Peng, Jianning Wu & Zhiyong Liu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Xuhong Guo

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  1. Hao Wang
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Correspondence to Jianning Wu or Zhiyong Liu.

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H.W. and Y.W. contributed equally to this work.

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Wang, H., Wu, Y., Wu, P. et al. Environmentally benign chitosan as reductant and supporter for synthesis of Ag/AgCl/chitosan composites by one-step and their photocatalytic degradation performance under visible-light irradiation. Front. Mater. Sci. 11, 130–138 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11706-017-0383-y

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