AUTHOR=Niu Pingping , Wu Guanghui , Chen Pinghua , Zheng Huitao , Cao Qun , Jiang Hualin 

TITLE=Optimization of Boron Doped TiO2 as an Efficient Visible Light-Driven Photocatalyst for Organic Dye Degradation With High Reusability

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Chemistry

VOLUME=8

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/chemistry/articles/10.3389/fchem.2020.00172

DOI=10.3389/fchem.2020.00172

ISSN=2296-2646

ABSTRACT=<p>No visible light activity is the bottle neck for wide application of TiO<sub>2</sub>, and Boron doping is one of the effective way to broaden the adsorption edge of TiO<sub>2</sub>. In this study, several Boron doped TiO<sub>2</sub> materials were prepared via a facile co-precipitation and calcination process. The B doping amounts were optimized by the degradation of rhodamine B (Rh B) under visible light irradiation, which indicated that when the mass fraction of boron is 6% (denoted as 6B-TiO<sub>2</sub>), the boron doped TiO<sub>2</sub> materials exhibited the highest activity. In order to investigate the enhanced mechanism, the difference between B-doped TiO<sub>2</sub> and bare TiO<sub>2</sub> including visible light harvesting abilities, separation efficiencies of photo-generated electron-hole pairs, photo-induced electrons generation abilities, photo-induced charges transferring speed were studied and compared in details. h<sup>+</sup> and <sup>·</sup><inline-formula><mml:math id="M1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msubsup><mml:mrow><mml:mtext>O</mml:mtext></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:msubsup></mml:math></inline-formula> were determined to be the two main responsible active species in the photocatalytic oxidation process. Besides the high degradation efficiency, 6B-TiO<sub>2</sub> also exhibited high reusability in the photocatalysis, which could be reused at least 5 cycles with almost no active reduction. The results indicate that 6B-TiO<sub>2</sub> has high photocatalytic degradation ability toward organic dye of rhodamine B under visible light irradiation, which is a highly potential photocatalyst to cope with organic pollution.</p>