Morphological guided sphere to dendrite BiVO4 for highly efficient organic pollutant removal and photoelectrochemical performance under solar light

Monoclinic BiVO₄ (m-BiVO₄) has been reported as promising phase for solar light driven photocatalysis. However, in the case of morphology guided BiVO₄ with different synthetic conditions maintaining the m-BiVO₄ phase remains a substantial challenge for achieving an efficient photocatalyst driven by solar light. Herein, a simple hydrothermal approach was used to produce well-defined template free m-BiVO₄ dendrites with distinct branches for photo catalytically removal of organic pollutant and photocurrent generation. The development of monoclinic dendrite BiVO₄ was confirmed after comprehensive structural, morphological, and optical examinations. FE-SEM images of m-BiVO₄ revealed transformation of spherical to dendritic morphology with distinct branches by simply changing the HNO₃ to NaOH ratios from 2:1 to 2:2, which are named as BVO 2-1 and BVO 2-2, respectively. The BVO 2-2 dendrites exhibited improved activity of 98% towards methylene blue (MB) photodegradation upon simulated solar light irradiation. The BVO 2-2 dendrites photoelectrode showed an outstanding photocurrent density of 1.4245 mAcm^-2 than that of the BVO 2-1 spherical photoelectrode (0.7367 mAcm^-2). Enhanced photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical action, could be ascribed to the unique morphological changes provides photoactive sites, harvest more light utilization together with higher separation of e^-/h⁺ pairs. Furthermore, photocatalytic mechanism is investigated based on scavenger trapping agent, valence band XPS, UV Visible DRS and PL study. Our findings could pave the way for the development of dendritic nanostructure photocatalysts with improved photocatalytic activity.