Abstract
Recently, the research on the remediation of aqueous organic pollutants over visible-lightactive photocatalysts has got much attention. Therefore, this study reports the fabrication of visiblelight-active Co3O4-Bi2O3 heterojunction photocatalyst for the photodegradation of rhodamine B dye. The Co3O4-Bi2O3 heterojunction was synthesized by the coprecipitation method and characterized by XRD, EDS, SEM, TEM, TGA, and FTIR. The as-prepared Co3O4-Bi2O3 heterojunction was utilized as a photocatalyst for the abatement of rhodamine B dye. It was observed that Co3O4-Bi2O3 showed the best catalytic performance with -92% degradation of rhodamine B dye than Co3O4 and Bi2O3 with 14 and 34% removal of rhodamine B dye, respectively. The rate constant for Co3O4-Bi2O3 catalyzed photodegradation of rhodamine B was 6 times and 3 times higher than the rate constant for Co3O4 catalyzed and Bi2O3 catalyzed photodegradation of rhodamine B, respectively. The as-prepared Co3O4-Bi2O3 exhibited the highest catalytic performance at pH 8. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).