Room-temperature synthesis of Ag3PO4 nanoparticles with the assistance of trisodium citrate for photocatalytic dye degradation

In this work, cubic silver phosphate (Ag3PO4) nanoparticles (NPs) are prepared with the assistance of trisodium citrate. By controlling the reaction time, Ag3PO4 of different sizes were obtained. The possible growth mechanism of Ag3PO4 NPs based on trisodium citrate assistance is that trisodium citrate suppresses the deposition speed of Ag+ ions on the particle surface during the formation of Ag3PO4 NPs. The photocatalytic activity of the obtained Ag3PO4 NPs was verified based on the photodegradation of rhodamine B (RhB), methylene blue (MB) and methyl orange (MO), which showed that Ag3PO4 NPs had a high photocatalytic activity for MB in neutral solutions under visible-light illumination. A variety of methods, such as TEM, HRTEM, EDS, UV-vis, and FT-IR were used to investigate the characteristics of the typical Ag3PO4 NPs before and after the photodegradation experiments. The results indicated that the as-prepared Ag3PO4 NPs did not change much after the photodegradation test. Furthermore, the cyclic test confirmed its good stability, and the photocatalytic activity of Ag3PO4 NPs declined only by 4.4% after five recycles. This work provides a preparation strategy for Ag3PO4 NPs with a highly photocatalytic performance by an environmentally friendly method.