Enhanced activity of ZnS(111) by N/Cu co-doping:Accelerated degradation of organic pollutants under visible light

High-efficiency photocatalysts are of great significance for the application of photocatalytic technology in water treatment.In this study,N/Cu co-doped ZnS nanosphere photocatalys(N/Cu-ZnS) is synthesized by a hydrothermal method for the first time.After doping,the tex ture of nanosphere becomes loose,the nanometer diameter is reduced,making the specific surface area of catalyst increased from 34.73 to 101.59 m^(2)/g.The characterization results show that more ZnS (111) crystal planes are exposed by N/Cu co-doping;the calculations of density functional theory show that N/Cu co-doping can increase the catalytic activity of the ZnS (111) crystal plane,enhance the adsorption capacity of (111) crystal plane to O_(2)and promote the generation of·O_(2)-.The energy levels of the introduced impurities can be hybridized with the energy levels of S and Zn at the top of valence band and the bottom o conduction band,which makes the band gap narrower,thus enhancing the absorption o visible light.Compared with pure ZnS,the degradation rates of 2,4-dichlorophenol (2,4-DCP and tetracycline (TC) by N/Cu-ZnS under visible light (>420 nm) are increased by 83.7 and51 times,respectively.In this research,a promising photocatalyst for photocatalytic degra dation of organic pollutants in wastewater is provided.

Facile Method to Prepare Metal Sulfide(Ag_2S,CuS,PbS) Nanoparticles Grown on Surface of Polyacrylonitrile Nanofibre and Their Optical Properties

Polyacrylonitrile-metal sulfide nanocomposites with metal sulfide（Ag2S, CuS, PbS） nanoparticles homo- geneously dispersed on the polyacrylonitrile（PAN） nanofibre were synthesized by means of electrospinning techno- logy combined with gas-solid reaction. A series of experiments was performed to characterize the morphology varia- tion and distribution of the nanocrystalline. The result shows that the concentration of metal salt aqueous solution affects the size and morphology of metal sulfide nanoparticles during the chelating process. Further more, these metal ions nanoparticles were attached to the surface of the nanofibre homogeneously through chelating effect which will be propitious to prevent nanoparticles from aggregation. These results suggest that the method reported here is ex- tremely effective for synthesizing PAN-metal sulfide nanocomposites which have good visible light photocatalytic activity. Further more, this method could be extended to prepare other PAN-metal halides nanocomposites, too.