Photosynergetic bimetallic Fe-Cu codoped melem polymer for boosting Fenton-like catalytic performance: Insights into the enhancement mechanism

[Display omitted] •Highly dispersed Cu, Fe codoped melem polymer is successfully synthesized.•Bimetallic codoping and photocatalysis significantly boosts catalytic performance.•The CFMP shows good catalytic ability over a wide pH range with a low metal leaching.•The CFMP shows excellent catalytic ability to multiple organic pollutants. Fenton oxidation is a promising technology for wastewater treatment. However, the slow redox cycle rate of transition-metal ions limits the improvement of catalytic performance. Therefore, accelerating the redox cycle rate to boost catalytic performance is very important for practical wastewater treatment. Herein, a simple one-step thermal polycondensation method is utilized to synthesize a bimetallic Fe-Cu codoped melem polymer (CFMP). The doped Cu and Fe species are uniformly dispersed in the melem polymer to maximize the exposure of metal active sites. Compared to the monometallic doped melem polymer, the CFMP exhibits better catalytic performance for p-nitrophenol with the degradation efficiency of 91.43 % within 90 min. The excellent catalytic performance of CFMP can be attributed to the dual-synergy of bimetallic codoping and photocatalysis. In addition, the CFMP catalyst exhibits excellent catalytic performance for the degradation of multiple organic pollutants with the degradation efficiency of above 85 %. The CFMP catalyst also shows good catalytic performance over a broad pH range (2.0–11.0) with low a leaching concentration of metal ions. The catalytic performance is enhanced in natural water matrices, implying the catalyst has strong anti-interference ability. Therefore, the CFMP catalyst synthesized in this study has excellent application prospects for practical wastewater treatment.