Morphological and elemental tuning of BiOCl/BiVO 4 heterostructure for uric acid electrochemical sensor and antibiotic photocatalytic degradation.

Deep eutectic solvents (DES) consisting of EG-(ChCl: C ₂ H ₆ O ₂ ) and TU-(ChCl: CH ₄ N ₂ S) assisted synthesized BiOCl/BiVO ₄ heterostructured catalyst studied for electrochemical uric acid (UA) sensor and tetracycline photocatalytic degradation. The chemical composition of the BiOCl/BiVO ₄ catalyst was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). UV-vis spectroscopy reveals increased absorption of visible light till the near-infrared region, which results in a narrowing of band gap energy from 2.3 eV to 2.2 eV for BiOCl/BiVO ₄ -TU. Morphology of catalyst analyzed using field-emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) and Transmission electron microscope (TEM) technique. Time-Resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) confirms an increased lifetime of e ^- /h ⁺ pair after heterostructure formation. The catalyst-modified glassy carbon electrode shows selectivity toward the detection of uric acid (UA). The limit of detection (LOD) is estimated to be 0.04688 μM for UA; also, interference and stability of catalyst were studied. Photocatalytic activity of the synthesized catalyst was investigated by degrading tetracycline (TC) antibiotic pollutants, and their intermediate product was analyzed by ion trap mass spectrometry (MS).
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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