A green and facile strategy for preparation of novel and stable Cr-doped SrTiO₃/g-C₃N₄ hybrid nanocomposites with enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity

Herein, a green and facile strategy to prepare graphite carbon nitride hybridized chromium doping strontium titanate spheres (CrSTO/g-CN) nanocomposites was reported in this study. The structure characterization clearly indicated that the CrSTO spheres were successfully loaded on the g-C₃N₄ nano-sheets forming the CrSTO/g-CN heterojunction. Furthermore, the measurement of photocatalytic activity revealed that the as-prepared CrSTO/g-CN hybrid nanocomposites exhibit the considerable stability and significantly enhanced photocatalytic activity for the degradation of rhodamine B under visible light irradiation. Especially the photocatalytic activity of CrSTO/g-CN-70% was almost 4.5 times higher than that of pure g-C₃N₄ and 3.5 times higher than that of pure Cr-doped SrTiO₃ respectively. The enhanced photocatalytic activity of the CrSTO/g-CN hybrid nanocomposites was due to a synergistic effect following the Z-scheme charge transfer mechanism to enhanced charge-separation ability. Therefore, the CrSTO/g-CN hybrid nanocomposites could be of potential interest for water splitting, new fuels synthesis and environmental remediation under natural sunlight. - Highlights: • We synthesized the CrSTO/g-CN nanocomposites via a green and facile method. • CrSTO/g-CN nanocomposites showed an enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity than CrSTO and g-C₃N₄. • A possible Z-scheme charge transfer mechanism was proposed in our paper