Solar-driven environments disinfection via optimized S-scheme Bi₂MoO₆/KNbO₃ heterostructures: Decoupling surface...

Photocatalytic reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation represents a crucial strategy for bacterial inactivation in environmental remediation. Addressing the inherent limitations of single-phase photocatalysts, including high photogenerated carrier recombination rates and low solar spectrum utilization efficiency due to their single band structure, this study designed and constructed an S-scheme heterojunction-based high-efficiency antibacterial material, Bi₂MoO₆/KNbO₃. The Bi₂MoO₆/KNbO₃ composite fabricated through hydrothermal synthesis demonstrated significantly enhanced photocatalytic antibacterial performance, achieving a bacterial inactivation efficiency of 99.5 % under 20 min of visible light irradiation. This represents 3.75-fold and 2.29-fold improvements compared to pristine KNbO₃ and Bi₂MoO₆, respectively. Through in situ characterization and theoretical calculations, we confirmed that the synergistic effect of the built-in electric field and band bending at the heterointerface drives the S-scheme charge transfer mechanism, enabling efficient spatial separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs as the primary factor for enhanced antibacterial performance. Quenching experiments quantitatively analyzed the antibacterial contributions, revealing that ROS (74.72 %) predominantly governs the bacterial inactivation process, complemented by physical damage from surface microstructures and auxiliary metal ion leaching. This investigation provides novel strategic insights for developing high-performance photocatalytic antibacterial materials.