Highly efficient removal of organic contaminant with wide concentration range by a novel self-cleaning hydrogel: Mechanism, degradation pathway and DFT calculation

A novel carbon nitride based self-cleaning hydrogel photocatalyst (KI-PCN gel, potassium and iodine co-doped carbon nitride confined in alginate) has been successfully constructed by a facile method. Fabricated photocatalyst showed enhanced synergistic adsorption-photocatalytic degradation property on a high concentration of methylene blue (HMB) because of enhanced carrier separation efficiency and improved light adsorption capacity of KI-PCN. As expected, the KI-PCN gel showed the highest apparent rate constant value (Kapp =0.0310 min−1), which was about 38.8 and 5.8 times as that of blank hydrogel (Kapp=0.0008 min−1) and PCN gel (Kapp=0.0053 min−1), respectively. Meanwhile, KI-PCN gel can continuously adsorb low concentration of MB (LMB), and the MB-adsorbed KI-PCN gel can self-clean under light irradiation. The bench-scale experiments simulating real river showed that KI-PCN gel can effectively and continuously remove LMB (0.1–20 ppm), indicating the possibility for the removal of contaminants in natural rivers. Furthermore, the possible degradation pathways were proposed by combining the density functional calculations (DFT) and intermediates identified by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). This work proposed a new perspective to acquire a novel self-cleaning and easily recyclable photocatalyst for treatment of wide concentration range organic wastewater as well as remediation of natural waterbody.