Integration of Ag2WO4 and AgBr with TiO2 to fabricate ternary nanocomposites: Novel plasmonic photocatalysts with remarkable activity under visible light

Novel and highly efficient visible-light-driven TiO2/Ag2WO4/AgBr plasmonic photocatalysts were fabricated by a simple one-pot strategy and they were characterized using XRD, EDX, FESEM, TEM, HRTEM, UV–vis DRS, FT–IR, and PL instruments. The TiO2/Ag2WO4/AgBr nanocomposites exhibited higher photocatalytic performance under visible light for RhB, fuchsine, and MO degradations compared with the pure TiO2 and binary TiO2/Ag2WO4 and TiO2/AgBr nanocomposites. The optimum photocatalytic activity of the TiO2/Ag2WO4/AgBr (15%) nanocomposite is greater than those of the TiO2, TiO2/Ag2WO4 (10%), and TiO2/AgBr (15%) photocatalysts towards the degradation of RhB by a factor of almost 50.6, 22.6, and 5.1, respectively. The degradation reaction was also examined through trapping experiments and a mechanism for generation of the e−/h+ pairs under visible light and promotion spatial separation of the charges through tandem n-n heterojunctions was proposed. We anticipate that the procedure used in this paper can provide a good protocol to design efficient visible-light-driven photocatalysts using TiO2 for environmental applications.