Effective visible light-active boron and europium co-doped BiVO_4 synthesized by sol-gel method for photodegradion of methyl orange

摘要

Eu-B co-doped BiVO_4 visible-light-driven photocatalysts have been synthesized using the sol-gel method. The resulting materials were characterized by a series of joint techniques, including XPS, XRD, SEM, BET, and UV-vis DRS analyses. Compared with BiVO_4 and B-BiVO4 photocatalysts, the Eu-B-BiVO_4 photocatalysts exhibited much higher photocatalytic activity for methyl orange (MO) degradation under visible light irradiation. The optimal Eu doping content is 0.8 mol%. It was revealed that boron and europium were doped into the lattice of BiVO_4 and this led to more surface oxygen vacancies, high specific surface areas, small crystallite size, a narrower band gap and intense light absorbance in the visible region. The doped Eu(Ⅲ) cations can help in the separation of photogenerated electrons. The syn-ergistic effects of boron and europium in doped BiVO_4 were the main reason for improving visible light photocatalytic activity.