Generating oxygen vacancies in Cu2+-doped TiO2 hollow spheres for enhanced photocatalytic activity and antimicrobial activity

摘要

Developing cheap photocatalysts with highly visible-light activity is greatly desired for environmental pollution treatment. In this work, the authors designed and synthesised Cu2+-doped TiO2 (Cu-TiO2) hollow spheres with enhanced photocatalytic activity and antimicrobial activity using a simple hydrothermal process. The X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) results revealed that Cu-TiO2 hollow spheres were anatase crystal phase. The Cu2+-doped into TiO2 can be confirmed by XRD, Raman spectra, and UV-Vis spectrum. The photocatalytic activity of Cu-TiO2 samples was evaluated by the degradation of methyl orange. Comparing to the undoped TiO2, 6% Cu-TiO2 sample exhibited remarkably high photocatalytic towards methyl orange under simulated sunlight irradiation, which was attributed to the fact that copper ion doping produced numerous oxygen vacancies (V-O) in the material. In addition, it also showed improved antibacterial properties against both Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus (S.aureus) and Gram-negative Escherichia coli (E.coli) bacteria. These results establish that Cu2+ doping can obviously improve the photocatalytic performance of TiO2 under simulated sunlight.