Facile and large scale synthesis of novel Cu2O octahedral crystals with efficient visible light photocatalytic activity

• Cu2O octahedral crystals are successfully synthesized by a chemical process.
• Cu2O octahedral crystals are very pure.
• Cu2O showed efficient photocatalytic activity with irradiation of 410 nm LED light.

In this paper, Cu2O octahedral microcrystal was successfully synthesized by a facile one-step reaction at relatively low temperature of 96 °C. The morphology, chemical composition, crystal structure and optical properties were characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) and UV–vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). The results indicated that the size of Cu2O octahedral particles is 1.5–2 μm and the samples are very pure. In addition, the photocatalytic performance of samples was evaluated by the cycling degradation of methylene blue (MB) under 410 nm light emitting diode (LED) irradiation. Cu2O exhibited efficient and stable photocatalytic activity, and the rate constant for the degradation of MB photocatalyzed by Cu2O is 7.7 times more than that of P25 TiO2.

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