Enhanced visible-light photocatalytic performance of electrospun carbon-doped TiO2/halloysite nanotube hybrid nanofibers

• Multi-aperture electrospun hybrid of C-doped TiO2/HNT nanofibers has been achieved.
• Visible-light photocatalytic performance of hybrid nanofibers is significantly enhanced.
• Mechanism of the enhancement for the photocatalytic performance by HNTs is discussed.

In this work, the effects of halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) on the visible-light photocatalytic ability of electrospun carbon doped TiO2/HNT (CTH) nanofibers have been explored. Structural and morphological investigations demonstrate that incorporation of HNTs into anatase CTH hybrid nanofibers was easily achieved by using sol–gel processing combined with electrospinning approach, thus HNTs could be uniformly embedded in the electrospun nanofibers. The visible-light photocatalytic efficiency of CTH hybrid on the degradation of methyl blue (MB) was greatly enhanced with the combination of moderate amount of HNTs (8%), which was 23 times higher than that of commercial anatase TiO2. Mechanism of the enhancing effect of HNTs has been explored by analyzing the dual-effect of adsorption and photocatalysis in various amounts of HNTs incorporated CTiO2 nanofibers. With nanotubular structure and considerable adsorption ability, incorporated HNTs functioned as porogen agent in CTH nanofibers. This simple incorporation approach increases the specific surface areas of nanofibers, which improves the mass transport of reactant into the nanofibers and the adsorption of visible-light by scattering, meanwhile may suppress the charge recombination and enhance photoinduced charge separation, thus efficiently enhancing visible-light photocatalytic performance of the CTH hybrid nanofibers.

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