Bioinspired C/TiO₂ photocatalyst for rhodamine B degradation under visible light irradiation

Abstract

Papilio paris butterfly wings were replicated by a sol-gel method and a calcination process, which could take advantage of the spatial features of the wing to enhance their photocatalytic properties. Hierarchical structures of P. paris-carbon-TiO₂ (PP-C-TiO₂) were confirmed by SEM observations. By applying the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller method, it was concluded that in the presence of wings the product shows higher surface area with respect to the pure TiO₂ made in the absence of the wings. The higher specific surface area is also beneficial for the improvement of photocatalytic property. Furthermore, the conduction and valence bands of the PP-C-TiO₂ are more negative than the corresponding bands of pure TiO₂, allowing the electrons to migrate from the valence band to the conduction band upon absorbing visible light. That is, the presence of C originating from wings in the PP-C-TiO₂ could extend the photoresponsiveness to visible light. This strategy provides a simple method to fabricate a high-performance photocatalyst, which enables the simultaneous control of the morphology and carbon element doping.

Keywords

bioinspired / butterfly wings / C/TiO₂ / photocatalyst / visible light

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31470584) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2572017AB08).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jian Li, Likun Gao, and Wentao Gan declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2017. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)