Construction of CuCo Alloy Nanoparticle/g-C3N4 n-n Heterojunction: An Efficient Strategy for Solar Driven Photocatalytic Degradation of Ibuprofen and in situ Hydrogen Gas Evolution and Transfer Hydrogenation of Styrene via Tandem Photocatalysis

Abstract

Metal nanoparticles (MNPs) have been usually applied for photocatalytic applications as they show enhanced physical and chemical properties. Bimetallic nanoparticles, composed of two different metals have drawn a greater interest than the monometallic nanoparticles as they possess abundant active sites and high surface energy because of the numerous defects. However, bimetallic Nanoparticles lose their catalytic behaviour due to their aggregation. To overcome this issue support material like graphitic nitride (g-C3N4) has been found as suitable material. g-C3N4 possesses a narrow band gap (about 2.7 eV) that endows it with superior light absorption capacity. Besides, it shows unique electronic structure, high thermal and chemical stability as well as less toxicity. Highlighting this, in this work we report a non-noble CuCo bimetallic nanoparticle supported on g-C3N4 as efficient nanocatalyst for the photocatalytic degradation of Ibuprofen. In addition, its efficiency for H2 evolution by water splitting has also been evaluated. The structural confirmation of the synthesized nanocatalyst was characterized by using sophisticated techniques like Powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Raman spectroscopy, UV-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), photoluminescence study and N2 adsorption-desorption analysis. Our study revealed that CuCo supported on g-C3N4 showed the photocatalytic degradation of Ibuprofen of about 97%. It also showed H2-evolution amount of 4638.4 μmol g-1 h -1 . The enhanced photocatalytic activity may be due to CuCo bimetallic nanoparticles that convert the energy of the sunlight into surface plasmon resonance oscillations and transfers the plasmonic energy to the electron-hole pair.