Facile one-pot synthesis of a BiOBr/Bi2WO6 heterojunction with enhanced visible-light photocatalytic activity for tetracycline degradation

Photocatalytic removal of tetracycline (TC) from the wastewater is of great value in the chemical and environmental engineering field. Here, we introduced a facile one-step method for the synthesis of BiOBr/Bi2WO6 heterojunctions by using cheap CTAB as the Br source. We showed the possibility of our method to fine-tune the content of BiOBr in the produced BiOBr/Bi2WO6 by simply changing the dosage of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), providing a platform for the delicate tuning of the visible-light absorbance ability of the composites. With a suitable heterojunction structure of BiOBr/Bi2WO6-0.2, it exhibited an ultrarapid photocatalytic activity towards TC (20 mg·L−1), with a competitive removal efficiency of 88.1% within 60 min and an ultrahigh removal rate of 0.0349 min−1. It could also be robustly recycled for at least 5 cycles with slight removal efficiency loss. We demonstrated that this exciting photocatalytic performance was due to the highly decreased recombination of photoinduced electrons and holes on our composites by constructing this heterojunction structure, and the resulting OH and ·O2-contributed to the effective degradation of TC to CO2.