Template-free synthesis of nanosliced BiOBr hollow microspheres with high surface area and efficient photocatalytic activity

•Novel BiOBr hollow microsphere were fabricated via one-pot solvothermal method without addition of spherical template.•BiOBr hollow microsphere possessed high BET surface area due to the highly hollow architecture.•A possible growth mechanism for BiOBr hollow microsphere architecture was proposed.•Excellent photocatalytic activity was achieved attributed to the special hollow hierarchical microsphere architectures. BiOBr hollow microspheres which were composed of BiOBr nanoslices were synthesized via a simple one-pot solvothermal method at 160 °C for 12 h without the addition of any spherical template. The resulted BiOBr hollow microspheres were regular in shape with external diameter of 1.4 μm in average. As a result, due to the highly hollow architecture, the resulted BiOBr hollow microsphere processed high BET surface area of 76.38 m2 g−1. Besides, a series of time-depended experiments had been listed, showing the morphological evolution for the formation and decomposition of the BiOBr hollow microspherical structure. SDS, which acted as a surfactant, played an important role in controlling the morphology of BiOBr. The obtained BiOBr hollow microspheres exhibited higher photocatalytic activity in the degradation of MB and RhB under visible-light irradiation.