Enhanced Photocatalytic Activity of Bi3NbO7 by Fabrication of CuBi2O4/Bi3NbO7 Heterojunction Photocatalyst

Zhenkun Cheng (Department of Chemical Engineering, Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Liaoning, Shenyang, 110142)
Dongbin Liu (Department of Chemical Engineering, Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Liaoning, Shenyang, 110142)
Lihui Fan (Department of Chemical Engineering, Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Liaoning, Shenyang, 110142)
Yanming Shen (Department of Chemical Engineering, Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Liaoning, Shenyang, 110142)

Bulletin of Chemical Reaction Engineering & Catalysis
2026: BCREC Volume 21 Issue 3 Year 2026 (October 2026)

Bi3NbO7 has been widely studied as a bismuth-based photocatalyst for degradation of organic pollutants. However, the fast recombination of photo-excited carriers limits its photocatalytic performance. In this work, the CuBi2O4/Bi3NbO7 heterojunction was successfully fabricated, and its photocatalytic performance was evaluated by degradation of TC under stimulated sunlight. The optimal TC degradation efficiency of 85% was obtained on CuBi2O4/Bi3NbO7 heterojunction with CuBi2O4 mass ratio of 10% at the condition as initial TC concentration of 40 mg/L and photocatalyst dosage of 1 g/L. This optimal TC degradation efficiency is greatly higher than that of bulk Bi3NbO7 with the reaction rate constant reached 0.035 min-1 which is 3.7 times as that of Bi3NbO7. The photocatalytic degradation mechanism that based on type-II heterojunction was proposed. This work provided a promising strategy to design highly efficient photocatalysts for environmental remediation. Copyright © 2026 by Authors, Published by BCREC Publishing Group. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).