Flowerlike C-doped BiOCl nanostructures: Facile wet chemical fabrication and enhanced UV photocatalytic properties

3D-flowerlike C-doped bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl) hierarchical structures have been synthesized using polyacrylamide (PAM) as both chelating and doping agents. The growth mechanism and photocatalytic properties were discussed. •Flowerlike C-doped BiOCl nanostructure were synthesized via a wet chemical method for the first time.•PAM plays the role of both as chelating and doping agents.•The microstructrue, morphology and photocatalytic activity are greatly dependent on the PAM content.•C-doped BiOCl nanostructure showed greatly enhanced photocatalytic performance. 3D-flowerlike C-doped bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl) hierarchical structures have been synthesized through a facile, low temperature wet-chemical method using polyacrylamide (PAM) as both chelating and doping agents. The flowerlike products are composed of nanosheets, as verified by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The crystal structure and compositional characteristics were investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Photocatalytic activities of C-doped BiOCl samples with different amounts of PAM adding were investigated by the degradation of methyl orange (MO) dye and colorless phonel contaminant under ultra-violet light irradiation. The as-prepared C-doped BiOCl exhibited much higher photocatalytic activity than the pure one. Moreover, the best performance of the photo-degradation was observed on the sample synthesized by 0.4g PAM adding. The results show that C-doped BiOCl can be used as a promising candidate for water-purification.