Defect-engineered dual Z-scheme core-shell MoS/WO/AgBiS for antibiotic and dyes degradation in photo and night catalysis: Mechanism and pathways.

Water pollution caused by antibiotics and synthetic dyes and imminent energy crises due to limited fossil fuel resources are issues of contemporary decades. Herein, we address them by enabling the multifunctionality in dual Z-scheme MoS/WO/AgBiS across photolysis, photo Fenton-like, and night catalysis. Defect, basal, and facet-engineered WO is modified with MoS and AgBiS, which extended its photoresponse from the UV-NIR region, inhibited carrier recombination, and reduced carrier transfer resistance. The electric field rearrangement leads to a flow of electrons from MoS and AgBiS to WO and intensifies the electron population, which is crucial for night catalysis. When MoS/WO/AgBiS was employed against doxycycline hydrochloride (DOXH), it removed 95.65, 81.11, and 77.92 % of DOXH in 100 min during photo-Fenton (PFR), night-Fenton (NFR), and photocatalytic (PCR) reactions, respectively. It also effectively removed 91.91, 98.17, 99.01, and 98.99 % of rhodamine B (RhB), Congo red (CR), methylene blue (MB), and methylene orange (MO) in Fenton reactions, respectively. ESR analysis consolidates the ROS generation feature of MoS/WO/AgBiS using HO with and without irradiation. This work provides a strategy to eliminate the deficiencies of WO and is conducive to the evolution of applications seeking to combat environmental and energy crises.