Laser-reduced Preparation Of Copper-based Nanomaterials And Its Application In Photocatalysis

With the rapid development of economy,technology and globalization has brought environmental pollution and ecological destruction in nature.Water pollution is the first to cause human attention and the most far-reaching one of environment pullution.In which the dye wastwater is the most difficult to deal with because it’s strong triple effect and potential environmental risks.The dye wastwater has high concentrations of organic compounds and complex composition,so it’s deep color and difficult to be degradated,and the accumulation of dye contaminants in the environment under the action of microorganisms can produce aromatic amine intermediates.Traditional treatment has poor performance of dye pollutants mineralization,and is easily to lead secondary pollution.Therefore,searching a safer and more efficient organic wastewater treatment technology is imminent.In this study,we report a simple method to controllably synthesize Cu₂O-Cu nanocomposites by using a low-energy CO₂ laser,and application of these nanomaterials for photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue（MB）.The effects of various fabrication parameters on the morphology and plasmonic property of the Cu₂O-Cu composites were investigated.Our experiments show that Cu₂O-Cu composites prepared under the conditions of 10 mA laser irradiation and 5 M NaOH addition had the highest catalytic activity.Under the optimum conditions（10 mg/L MB concentration,and 0.3 g/L catalyst）,the degradation rate of MB is 90.10%after visible-light irradiating for 50 min.For inproving the performanc of catalyst,synthesized rGO-Cu₂O-Cu,Ag-Cu₂O-Cu,AgCl-Cu₂O-Cu compounds,and the effects of laser energy,pH and mass concentration of Cu have been studied.The best catalytic performance of those three compounds were 74.14%,25.75%（without H₂O₂）and 51.50%（without H₂O₂）,and it’s worth noting that Ag/AgCl-Cu₂O-Cu had 1.5/3.0 times degradation rates than pure Cu₂O-Cu（17.34%）in same condition without H₂O₂.This work could lead to facile synthesis of high-performance photocatalysts for fast removal of environmentally hazardous dyes from aqueous solution.