Excellent synergistic effect of adsorption and photocatalytic degradation from the novel Cu3SnS4@C nano-heterostructure

A new sphere-like nano-heterostructure of Cu 3 SnS 4 @C (CTS@C) was well designed and fabricated by two-step hydrothermal route, which is ideally suited for synergistic physical adsorption and photodegradation of anionic dye. Compared to the pure C or CTS nanospheres, CTS@C nano-heterostructure has smaller surface area but exhibits excellent performance. It possesses high adsorption efficiency of 97.04% for removal of methyl orange (MO) at pH 5.5. And also, the superior synergistic adsorption and photodegradation performance makes it exhibit 99.38% degradation efficiency within 210 min at pH 7.5, which is about 1.8 times higher than that of simplex adsorption (56.23%). These might be attributed to the higher light harvesting, effective charge separation, lower charge-transfer resistance and high photocurrent response properties of CTS@C nanostructures. Moreover, the CTS@C nano-heterostructured photocatalyst can effectively avoid surface passivation during the process of synergistic adsorption and photodegradation, and be easily regenerated from the reaction system for recycling, suggesting a promising candidates for synergistic adsorption and photocatalysis applications.