Abstract
Environmental pollution by organic pollutants is a serious concern which may be solved by photocatalytic degradation of pollutants, yet the efficiency of actual photocatalytic materials is limited. For instance, conventional MoS2 nanosheets tend to agglomerate, which hinders the access of pollutants to active sites. To overcome this challenge, we hypothesized that assembling MoS2 nanosheets on a mineral support would improve access to active sites. We synthesized a catalyst made of 3–4 atomic layers of MoS2 nanosheets deposited on tourmaline using a microwave hydrothermal method. Results show that tourmaline occurs as a polyhedron single crystal that supports the epitaxial growth of 2H-MoS2 layers on tourmaline (77\(\overline{3}\)) facets, while an intrinsic rolling up behavior of MoS2 layer from [002] to [106] on the mineral surface accounts for the curly morphology. The pangolin-like MoS2/tourmaline composite degrades rhodamine B much better than the pure MoS2 nanosheets assembled microspheres. This is explained by the reduced thickness of MoS2 nanosheets according to the density functional theory. Overall, our findings represent a new tactic for the cost-effective batch preparation of two-dimensional materials with high catalytic performance.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51874115), the Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project of China (No. 2020T130166), the CAS Youth Innovation Promotion Association (No. 2019190), the Introduced Overseas Scholars Program of Hebei province, China (No. C201808), the Enterprise Science and Technology Commissioner Project of Tianjin City, China (No. 19JCTPJC56100) and the Excellent Young Scientist Foundation of Hebei province, China (No. E2018202241).
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FW and JL conceived and supervised experiments. MH, LC, XX and DW performed experiments. WL and FW performed and analyzed the STEM characterization. HL performed the DFT simulations. FW, WL, BF, MH and LC prepared and revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the experiments and manuscript preparation.
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Hao, M., Li, H., Cui, L. et al. Higher photocatalytic removal of organic pollutants using pangolin-like composites made of 3–4 atomic layers of MoS2 nanosheets deposited on tourmaline. Environ Chem Lett 19, 3573–3582 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10311-021-01235-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10311-021-01235-6