Facile fabrication of protonated g-C3N4/oxygen-doped g-C3N4 homojunction with enhanced visible photocatalytic degradation performance of deoxynivalenol

Deoxynivalenol (DON) is a serious threat to water environment. In this work, the protonated g-C3N4/oxygen-doped g-C3N4 (CNH/OCN) simply prepared by the electrostatic assembling method was firstly used for the photodegradation of DON in water environment under the visible light irradiation. The results showed that the DON degradation rate of CNH/OCN-50 could reached 86.6% after 150 min of visible light irradiation. The reaction rate constant of CNH/OCN-50 was 0.79146 min−1, which was 1.13 times that of OCN, 1.50 times that of CNH, 3.24 times that of g-C3N4, 2.25 times that of ZnO, 1.94 times that of α-Fe2O3 and 5.15 times that of TiO2. The reason for the enhanced photocatalytic performance of CNH/OCN composites could be that a homojunction was formed in the CNH/OCN composites, which promoted the separation efficiency of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. Two intermediates of DON degradation, and it was preliminarily inferred that their toxicity was lower than DON. This work provides new insights into the degradation of DON.