Enhanced Photocatalytic Activity of V2C MXene-Coupled ZnO Porous Nanosheets with Increased Surface Area and Effective Charge Transfer

Photocatalysis performs excellently when degrading organic pollutants, but the photocatalytic degradation rate is not high for most photocatalysts due to their narrow sunlight adsorption range and high recombination rate of electron hole pairs. Herein, we use V2C-MXene with a wide sunlight adsorption range to couple ZnO porous nanosheets and form ZnO/MXene hybrids using a facile electrostatic self-assembly method. The ZnO/MXene hybrids acquired demonstrated improved photochemical efficiency in breaking down methylene blue (MB) when contrasted with porous ZnO nanosheets. The degradation rate of MB reached 99.8% under UV irradiation for 120 min after the ZnO/MXene hybrid formation, while 38.6% was attained by the ZnO porous nanosheets. Moreover, photodegradation rate constants (k) were calculated as 3.05 × 10−3 and 5.42 × 10−2 min−1 for ZnO porous nanosheets and ZnO/MXene hybrids, respectively, indicating that the photodegradation performance was enhanced by 17.8 times after the modification of V2C. This was probably because the modification of V2C can increase the specific surface area to provide more sites for MB adsorption, widen the sunlight adsorption range to produce good photothermal effect, and facilitate the transfer of photogenerated carriers in ZnO to promote the reaction of more photogenerated carriers with MB. Hence, this work offers a simple approach to creating effective photocatalysts for breaking down organic contaminants.