Hybrid high‐porosity rice straw infused with Bi VO 4 nanoparticles for efficient 2‐chlorophenol degradation

In this work, the coupling of Bi VO 4 nanoparticles with a highly porous material derived from rice straw (Bi VO 4 / RS composites) and the photocatalytic degradation of 2‐chlorophenol (2‐ CP ) in an aqueous solution was studied. The results indicated that Bi VO 4 / RS composites possessed a monoclinic structure. The morphologies of Bi VO 4 / RS composites consisted of spherical shapes of Bi VO 4 particles coated on the RS adsorbent. The specific surface area of Bi VO 4 increased from 1.9024 to 31.1153 m 2 /g after coating with RS adsorbent. A shift occurred in adsorption edge from 510 to 525 nm, corresponding to a reduction in band gap energy from 2.43 to 2.35 eV . The change in the optical adsorption edge and band gap of Bi VO 4 / RS composites may simultaneously result to the duplication of a structure caused by silicon species in rice straw, which was expected to be self‐doped into the Bi VO 4 crystal lattice during synthesis. The photocatalytic performance of 2‐chlorophenol under visible irradiation clearly showed that Bi VO 4 / RS composites displayed the highest photocatalytic activities in comparison with other pure samples, which were 2 times higher than that of Bi VO 4 .