Carbon-dot-induced oxygen vacancies in copper vanadate enabling persulfate photoactivation for tetracycline degradation

Ernan Pang; Shijia Li; Jie Wu; Qing Chang; Ning Li; Shengliang Hu

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2024.12.065

Carbon-dot-induced oxygen vacancies in copper vanadate enabling persulfate photoactivation for tetracycline degradation

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2024 Dec 11;683(Pt 1):232-240. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2024.12.065. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Ernan Pang¹, Shijia Li², Jie Wu³, Qing Chang¹, Ning Li¹, Shengliang Hu⁴

Affiliations

¹ Research Group of New Energy Materials and Devices, State Key Laboratory of Coal and CBM Co-Mining, North University of China, Taiyuan 030051, PR China.
² Institute of Traffic Engineering, Shanxi Vocational University of Engineering Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030051, PR China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Coal and CBM Co-Mining, Jincheng 048012, PR China.
⁴ Research Group of New Energy Materials and Devices, State Key Laboratory of Coal and CBM Co-Mining, North University of China, Taiyuan 030051, PR China. Electronic address: hsliang@yeah.net.

PMID: 39673936
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2024.12.065

Abstract

Synchronously creating oxygen vacancies (OVs) and an internal electric field (IEF) in photocatalysts could be an ideal strategy to facilitate photogenerated charge separation and surface reactions but remain unexplored for this use. In this work, we report that low-cost and multifunctional CDs can involve in the nucleation reaction of copper vanadates (CuVs) to create OVs and proper IEF at the interface by modulating the valence states of coppers under hydrothermal conditions. Thus, CDs synergistically serve as oxygen vacancy inducer and charge separator in CuVs to extract photogenerated carriers to trigger persulfate (PS) activation for the degradation of tetracycline hydrochloride (TC). It turns out that CDs-modulated CuVs exhibit the expected photocatalytic capacity to activate PS in water and enable TC decomposition efficiency approximately 8 times higher than CDs-free CuVs under visible light irradiation. Our investigations elucidate that the oxidative breakdown of TC is dominated by the active species cooperation of ¹O₂ with h⁺ and OH formed in photocatalytic reaction system.

Keywords: Carbon dots; Copper vanadate; Oxygen vacancy; Persulfate activation; Photocatalysis; Pollution degradation.