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ARTICLE

Preparation of CdS/g-C₃N₄ heterojunction photocatalyst with high activity sites by acid treatment

Y. L. Ma^*, Y. Y. Tao

College of Physics and Electronic Information Engineering, Qinghai University for Nationalities, Xining 810007, China

* Corresponding Author:

Chalcogenide Letters 2023, 20(2), 153-164. https://doi.org/10.15251/CL.2023.202.153

Received 16 November 2022; Accepted 15 February 2023;

Abstract

The key to achieve efficient degradation of organic pollutants lies in improving the separation efficiency of photogenerated electron-hole pairs in photocatalysts. Here, the hydrogen bonds between g-C₃N₄ layers were broken by concentrated acid etching and exfoliation to obtain a more dispersed and lighter g-C₃N₄ nanosheet structure, and then the CdS spherical nanoparticles were dispersed on g-C₃N₄ nanosheets by hydrothermal method. The optimal loading of CdS on g-C₃N₄ nanosheets was determined by testing the degradation performance of the composite photocatalysts with different loading amounts. The degradation performance was tested by simulating sunlight using a 700-800 W xenon lamp equipped with a 420 nm cut-off filter, which showed that the degradation of MB by 7% CdS/g-C₃N₄ photocatalyst was 90.7% for MB. It indicates that concentrated acid treatment and loading of CdS nanoparticles can significantly improve the photocatalytic activity of g-C₃N₄ nanosheets, which is attributed to the enhancedup conversion function of g-C₃N₄ by loading CdS to enhance the response range and ability of g-C₃N₄ in visible light and the photogenerated electron-hole pair separation rate by loading CdS, thus improving the photocatalytic performance of the composite.

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Keywords

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