Graphitic carbon nitride-based panchromatic composite photocatalysts: Visible light-driven elimination of nicotine and pathogenic microorganisms

Color, as an integral part of human life, enriches human material civilization and spiritual life. However, due to increasingly serious environmental pollution, the use of pigments is no longer limited to beautifying the environment, and their broader applications have also become the focus of research in recent years. Here, a simple one-step calcination method has been used to prepare new functional pigments by combining commercialized inorganic pigments with a novel g-C3N4 photocatalyst. These functional pigments exhibit high photocatalytic activity against nicotine under simulated sunlight and even weak white light emitting diode (white-LED) irradiation, and the degree of removal reached almost 100 % in 105 min. The novel photocatalytic pigments were further appended on the surface of low melting point sheath-core composite polyester fibers (LMPET), and the obtained multicolored photocatalytic fibers displayed multiple functions for photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants and antibacterial properties. Moreover, the prepared multicolored photocatalytic fibers could be recycled, and their catalytic performance was stable without significant reduction after ten cycles. The enhanced performance could be attributed to the expansion of the visible-light response range and the efficient separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. In addition, electron paramagnetic resonance analysis confirmed that center dot O-2(-) and O-1(2), rather than center dot OH, are the main reactive species for the photocatalytic reaction, effectively avoiding the oxidative corrosion of textile substrates. These novel photocatalytic pigments show great potential in the fields of painting and decoration, not only being aesthetically pleasing, but also acting to purify the indoor environment.