Advanced Materials Interfaces, 2017, 4, 1700845

Kai Sun, Lifang Wang, Chunzhi Wu, Jianping Deng,* and Kai Pan*

The treatment of dye polluting water is one of the most important tasks that are concerned with water resources. Herein, a nanofiber composite membrane (NCM) is fabricated with an aim to effectively degrade organic dyes. First, α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles are loaded on the surface of graphene oxide (GO) sheets through hydrothermal method. Then the as-prepared α-Fe2O3@rGO sheets are deposited on polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofiber mat via vacuum filtration to obtain α-Fe2O3@rGO/PAN NCM. Thus, the NCM has a doublelayer structure with α-Fe2O3@rGO as the upper layer and PAN nanofiber as the lower layer (support layer), providing structural advantages in photocatalytic degradation in solution. The composition, morphology, and structure of the NCM are characterized in detail. Photocatalytic experiments show that the NCM can effectively degrade a variety of organic dyes, among which the degradation rate of methylene blue is as high as 98.5% within 2 h. Moreover, the degradation rate still remains at high level after 5 cycles and the NCM remains intact, indicating the reusability of the NCM. It is in particular worth highlighting that high degradation efficiency is obtained even under natural sunlight, demonstrating great potential applications of the NCM in industrial dye wastewater treatment.