Rational Construction of MOF-Derived Porous ZnTiO3/TiO2 Heterostructured Photocatalysts with Remarkable Photocatalytic Performance

Fayun Wei; Yiwen Huang; Guangyu Zhang; Jiamu Dai; Ruiqing Li; Haifeng Zhang; Mingzheng Ge; Wei Zhang

doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c06307

Rational Construction of MOF-Derived Porous ZnTiO₃/TiO₂ Heterostructured Photocatalysts with Remarkable Photocatalytic Performance

ACS Omega. 2023 Oct 27;8(44):41765-41772. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.3c06307. eCollection 2023 Nov 7.

Authors

Fayun Wei^{1

2}, Yiwen Huang¹, Guangyu Zhang¹, Jiamu Dai¹, Ruiqing Li¹, Haifeng Zhang¹, Mingzheng Ge^{1

3

4}, Wei Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Textile and Clothing, Nantong University, Nantong 226019, P. R. China.
² College of Textile Science and Engineering, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou 310018, P. R. China.
³ Key Laboratory of Jiangsu Province for Silk Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, P. R. China.
⁴ Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering, University of Macau, Macau 999078, P. R. China.

Abstract

TiO₂ has been widely used in photodegradation of pollutants, but it suffers from inferior photocatalytic performance under solar light illumination. Thus, novel porous ZnTiO₃/TiO₂ heterostructured photocatalysts are constructed by hydrothermal and carbonization techniques using ZIF-8 as a sacrificial template. After coating with TiO₂, ZIF-8 nanocubes are selectively etched and subsequently coprecipitated with Ti ions during the hydrothermal process. Thereafter, the pores generated from carbonized ZIF-8 provide a large specific surface area and abundant active reaction sites for photocatalysis after annealing, producing stable ZnTiO₃/TiO₂ nanocomposites. Thus, porous ZnTiO₃/TiO₂ heterostructured photocatalysts exhibit excellent photocatalytic performance under solar light irradiation due to the boosted electron-hole separation/transfer. The kinetic constant of ZnTiO₃/TiO₂ nanocomposites (4.66 × 10^-1 min^-1) is almost 100 and 3.7 times higher than that of self-degradation (4.69 × 10^-3 min^-1) and TiO₂ (1.27 × 10^-1 min^-1), respectively. This facile strategy provides a deep insight into synthesizing heterostructured photocatalysts with high efficiency in the field of environmental remediation.