Facile synthesis of low crystalline BiOCl-based thermally-responsive photocatalyst with enhanced catalytic performance for photodegrading rhodamine B solution

Based on the superior photocatalytic activity of low crystalline BiOCl (LCB) and temperature responsive character of poly( N -isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), the novel BiOCl/GO@PNIPAM photocatalyst (PGOB) was successfully synthesized in this work by employing LCB as a photocatalytic core material, graphene oxide (GO) as a carrier for LCB, and PNIPAM as a thermo-sensitive shell material of the photocatalyst. Compared with the high crystalline BiOCl nanoplates (NPB), the core material LCB in PGOB exhibited superior photocatalytic activity and could be prepared simply by a mannitol complexation-assisted method under ambient conditions without any post-treatment. The interactions between mannitol and bismuth caused changes in chemical environment of bismuth in LCB. The morphology, crystallization, structure features and chemical compositions of the as-prepared samples were investigated by various techniques. The results showed that the prepared PGOB sample exhibited good temperature-responsive performance, excellent adsorption capacity and superior photocatalytic activities, the higher activity of which could be attributed to the effective separation and longer survival of the photogenerated carriers.