Visible light antibacterial potential of cement mortar incorporating Cu-ZnO/g-CN nanocomposites.

In this work, a hybrid Cu-ZnO/g-CN nanocomposite was synthesized and introduced to fabricate photocatalytic cement mortars by internal mixing. The bactericidal properties of the photocatalytic mortars were explored by using , and as a bacteria test strain. The results showed that the Cu-ZnO/g-CN nanocomposite had an enhanced harvesting of visible light energy and exhibited excellent stability during the photocatalytic process, which favored a long-term usage performance. The sterilizing efficiency of the photocatalytic cement mortars improved with an increasing content of Cu-ZnO/g-CN nanocomposites. A possible bactericidal mechanism was proposed based on the active species trapping experiments, verifying that the photogenerated holes (h) and ˙O radicals were the main active species.