Hydrothermal fabrication of BiOBr/magnetic reduced graphene oxide composites with efficient visible light photocatalytic activity

Novel magnetically separable BiOBr/magnetic reduced graphene oxide (BiOBr/MRGO) composite photocatalysts were fabricated using a one-step hydrothermal treatment . The photodegradation of RhB was choose as model reaction to evaluate the photocatalytic performance of as-prepared BiOBr/MRGO composites under visible light. The research results indicated that photocatalytic activities of all BiOBr/MRGO composites were markedly improved, compared to the single BiOBr. Among them, the BiOBr/MRGO hybrids with a MRGO mass ratio of 10% presented the highest photodegradation ability, and the kinetic constant of degradation was about 2 times higher than that of BiOBr. The enhancement of catalytic property was assigned to the increase of visible light absorption and the hindrance of photogenerated electron-hole pairs recombination originating from the introduction of MRGO. More importantly, BiOBr/MRGO exhibited excellent cycling stability after four cycles and could be easily separated by an external magnet and reused, which was convenient to the purification of organic pollutants.