Metal doped BiOCl nano-architectures (M-BiOCl, M = Ni, Mo, Cd, Co) for efficient visible light photocatalytic and antibacterial behaviour

Herein, we report the fabrication of well-crystalline metal (Ni, Mo, Cd and Co) doped BiOCl nanoscale photocatalytic material (M-BiOCl; M = Ni, Mo, Cd, and Co) by employing the solvothermal synthetic route. It was found that Ni doping results in remarkable improvement in photocatalytic and antibacterial behavior of BiOCl. The morphological investigation of typical samples by the FE-SEM revealed that undoped BiOCl shows closely stacked thick discs like morphology, while doping with different metals resulted into nanosheet (Ni, Cd), nanoflowers (Mo) and nanodiscs (Co) like morphologies. Interestingly, doping of Ni metal led to a substantial transformation into large size nanosheets with (010) prominent facet and increased surface area (41.927 m²/g) along with improved porous structure. Similarly, HR-TEM confirmed the formation of extended nanosheet like growth having dimensions ∼287.16 × 179.14 nm for Ni-BiOCl photocatalyst along with nano-pores morphology that might serve as active sites during photocatalysis or antibacterial activity. Moreover, the inclusion of Ni into BiOCl nanostructure brings the band gap (Eg) shifted to 2.85 eV from 3.54 eV (pure BiOCl), while all other metal doped nanostructure exhibited nearly similar Eg. Meanwhile, the photo-induced charge carriers recombination behaviour analysed by photoluminescence (PL) analysis shows diminished peak intensity for Ni-BiOCl as compared to pure BiOCl that can be directly correlated with minimum recombination of electron-hole during photocatalysis thus contributing for its excellent photocatalysis performance. In addition, we observed the excellent photocatalytic antibacterial activity of Ni-BiOCl against S. aureus bacteria under the visible light.