Fabrication of Self-Assembled BiFeO/CeO Nanocatalytic Materials for Efficient Catalytic Dye Degradation.

The catalytic treatment of wastewater serves as an effective way to solve the problem of water pollution, in which non-homogeneous Fenton catalysts are widely used. However, the activity enhancement of non-homogeneous Fenton catalysts still remains a great challenge. Herein, self-assembled BiFeO/CeO nanocatalytic materials with different molar ratios were successfully fabricated by a suspension blending method, following which the structure evolution was determined by various characterizations. The catalytic degradation of methylene blue (MB), rhodamine B (RhB), and saffron T (ST) were performed over the BiFeO/CeO nanocatalytic materials. It was found that the 0.2BiFeO:0.8CeO nanocatalytic materials exhibited an 80.8% degradation efficiency for RhB. The 0.6BiFeO:0.4CeO nanocatalytic materials reached 81.1% and 48.7% for ST and MB, respectively. The BiFeO/CeO nanocatalytic materials also showed a good stability during several cycles. The combination of CeO with BiFeO led to an enhanced activity for dye degradation, probably due to the electron transfer from ≡Fe to ≡Ce. This study provides a new approach to dye degradation by using Fenton catalytic systems.