The role of reduction extent of graphene oxide in the photocatalytic performance of Ag/AgX (X = Cl, Br)/rGO composites and the pseudo-second-order kinetics reaction nature of the Ag/AgBr system

Although reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-based photocatalyst composites have been intensively developed during the past few years, the influence of reduction extent of rGO on the photocatalytic performance of the rGO-based composite has virtually not been investigated due to some technical limitations, such as the poor water dispersibility of rGO and low reduction selectivity of the hydrothermal method, which make it difficult to control the reduction extent of rGO in these composites. Herein, we used a facile room-temperature method to synthesize Ag/AgX (X = Cl, Br)/rGO photocatalyst composites as a model to study the effect of reduction extent of rGO on the photocatalytic performance of the photocatalyst. It was found that the photocatalytic activities of both Ag/AgCl/PrGO and Ag/AgBr/PrGO systems had an optimized threshold of the reduction extent of photoreduced GO (PrGO). More importantly, due to the different conductive band values of AgCl and AgBr, the optimized thresholds in the two systems were at different PrGO reduction extents, based on which we proposed that the favorable energy band matching between AgX and PrGO in the two systems played a crucial role in obtaining high photocatalysis performance. Besides, the photocatalytic reaction of the Ag/AgBr based system was confirmed to be a pseudo-second-order kinetics reaction rather than pseudo-first-order kinetics reaction. The new insights presented in this work provided useful information on the design and development of a more sophisticated photocatalyst, and can also be applied to many other applications.