Excellent photocatalytic rhodamine B degradation for water remediation over Pr3+ doped Bi2WO6 microspheres

In this work, a series of Pr 3+ doped Bi 2 WO 6 had been successfully prepared by one-step hydrothermal method. The prepared Pr- Bi 2 WO 6 were characterized by XRD, UV–Vis DRS, PL, SEM, TEM, XPS and N 2 adsorption–desorption to study their physical–chemical properties. Rhodamine B (RhB) was photodegraded as a target organic pollutant to investigate the photocatalytic activity of the as-prepared samples. The results show that Pr doping retains the phase and morphology of Bi 2 WO 6 , enlarges the specific surface area and reduces the recombination rate of photogenerated electrons and holes, thus the removal efficiency of RhB under simulated solar irradiation was remarkably improved. The optimum molar ratio of Pr to Bi 2 WO 6 was 1%, whose degradation efficiency of RhB reached 99.4% within 20 min. The improved photocatalytic activity can be ascribed to the optimum optical absorption activity, the larger specific surface area and the morphology of microspheres which resulted in the effective separation of the photogenerated electron hole pairs. In addition, the h + plays a major role in the photodegradation of RhB by all Pr doped Bi 2 WO 6 samples according to the radical-trapping experiments.