Bismuth sulphides prepared by thermal and hydrothermal decomposition of a single source precursor: the effect of reaction parameters on morphology, microstructure and catalytic activity

Abstract

Bismuth sulphides were prepared by thermal and hydrothermal decomposition of a precursor, bismuth tris-diethyldithiocarbamate, at different temperatures and times. The obtained results showed that the thermal decomposition of the precursor in a tube furnace was not very appropriate to control particle size and morphology. XRD results showed that at 310 °C the precursor was not fully decomposed but at 500 °C besides the orthorhombic bismuth sulphide, the metallic bismuth also started to be formed. At the highest temperature 1D crystals were formed with an apparent mean crystal size of 138 nm. However, hydrothermal decomposition was shown to be a very suitable method to control particle size and morphology just by varying some parameters such as temperature and time. For 6 hours reaction time, as temperature increased, the apparent mean crystal size decreased. The particle morphology was also very affected by this parameter, at 180 °C only 1D particles (nanorods) with lengths varying from 25 to 4700 nm were formed but at 200 °C not only 1D particles but also 2D particles were (nanosheets) obtained. Bismuth sulphide particles obtained at 180 °C and 24 hours reaction time were shown to be formed mostly by 2D particles compared to those obtained at 6 hours. It was clearly seen that the increase in reaction time and temperature led to the formation of bi-dimensional particles. The presence of 1D crystals in the samples obtained by hydrothermal decomposition at 180 °C/6 h and 180 °C/24 h is responsible for their high catalytic efficiency towards methylene blue dye degradation.

Morphology controlled synthesis of wurtzite ZnS nanostructures through simple hydrothermal method and observation of white light emission from ZnO obtained by annealing the synthesized ZnS nanostructures

“…We have followed the method as illustrated by Marbán et al 37 and a similar method has been used earlier by Siqueira and colleagues in the case of MB dye degradation analysis using bismuth sulphide and zinc sulphide photocatalyst. 38,39 The total visible spectrum of MB dye has been deconvoluted into three Gaussian peaks (588 nm, 618 nm, and 664 nm) as shown in the inset of Fig. 9(b) for MB dye aer 40 min of irradiation as an example.…”