A novel strategy of hydrothermal in-situ grown bismuth based film on epoxy resin as recyclable photocatalyst for photodegrading antibiotics and sterilizing microorganism

Various photocatalyst powders (such as bismuth oxide/bismuth oxyiodide) can remove contaminants and microorganism from waterbody efficiently, but their practical application was limited due to poor recovery performance. To address this problem, we reported the construction of epoxy resin induced hydrothermal in-situ growth Z-scheme bismuth oxide/bismuth oxyiodide heterostructure film on various metals as a recycled photocatalysts. Novel epoxy resin was proposed to substitute in-situ growth film of seed layer constructed by magnetron sputtering and electrodeposition between film and metals. The universal flower-like microspheres (diameter: 3–5 μm) bismuth oxide/bismuth oxyiodide films (thickness: 13 μm) were grown on various metals. Additional film decorated by photothermal catalyst nanoparticles (such as Ag, diameter: 200 nm) was constructed. The metal/epoxy resin/film can efficiently photodegrade 83.8% of Rhodamine B (RhB) and 73.2% of triclosan (TCS) within 210 min under the visible light illumination. Furthermore, antimicrobial efficiency of bismuth oxide/bismuth oxyiodide neglected in the reported study was assessed and exhibited inactivation of >99.99% Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) at 6 h and 9 h of irradiation. The Z-scheme heterostructure film can simultaneously produce O2− and OH. In addition, there was a synergistic effect between the film and the silver nanoparticles, silver nanoparticles can not only further enhance the separation efficiency of photocarriers and generation efficiency of free radical, but also form silver ions to further improve the antimicrobial property. Therefore, metal/epoxy resin/film had broad application prospects as an easily recycled photocatalyst and can also be adopted to prepare other films for photocatalytic application.