Fabrication of Self-Assembled BiFeO₃/CeO₂ Nanocatalytic Materials for Efficient Catalytic Dye Degradation

The catalytic treatment of wastewater serves as an effective way to solve the problem of water pollution, in which non-homogeneous Fenton catalysts are widely used. However, the activity enhancement of non-homogeneous Fenton catalysts still remains a great challenge. Herein, self-assembled BiFeO₃/CeO₂ nanocatalytic materials with different molar ratios were successfully fabricated by a suspension blending method, following which the structure evolution was determined by various characterizations. The catalytic degradation of methylene blue (MB), rhodamine B (RhB), and saffron T (ST) were performed over the BiFeO₃/CeO₂ nanocatalytic materials. It was found that the 0.2BiFeO₃:0.8CeO₂ nanocatalytic materials exhibited an 80.8% degradation efficiency for RhB. The 0.6BiFeO₃:0.4CeO₂ nanocatalytic materials reached 81.1% and 48.7% for ST and MB, respectively. The BiFeO₃/CeO₂ nanocatalytic materials also showed a good stability during several cycles. The combination of CeO₂ with BiFeO₃ led to an enhanced activity for dye degradation, probably due to the electron transfer from ≡Fe²⁺ to ≡Ce⁴⁺. This study provides a new approach to dye degradation by using Fenton catalytic systems.