All‐In‐One Detection, Removal and Recovery of Hg<sup>2+</sup> in Industrial Wastewater with Plasmonic Schottky Heterostructures
Jun Wang, Shenghong Liu, Teng Liu, Jing Wang, Fangyang Liu, Ming Jia, Jie Li, Yanqing Lai, Yinghe Zhao, Liangxing Jiang, Yuan Li, Tianyou Zhai
Abstract
Abstract The effective governance of Hg 2+ in environmental wastewater is of profound significance to deal with the global pollution issues. However, the present methodologies usually only focused on a single function of either detection or removal, which encounters severe secondary pollution and cumbersome operation cost, while the integration of Hg 2+ detection, removal, and recovery in one process is barely realized. In this study, an All‐In‐One photoelectrochemical system is built combining the detection, removal, and recovery of Hg 2+ pollutant in a single process, by ingeniously developing a fundamental principle, namely alloying‐induced plasmonic quenching mechanism in Schottky heterostructures. Briefly, the high‐efficiency removal and recovery of Hg 2+ in wastewater is realized via the favorable alloying of Hg in Ag nanoparticles that well‐dispersed on the free‐standing WO 3 nanoplate networks. The formation of Ag–Hg alloy future leads to a remarkable plasmonic quenching effect of the Ag nanoparticles, which is used to modulate the photoelectrochemical singles to realize the high‐precision detection. Through this ingenious design, an ultralow Hg 2+ detection limit of 0.296 n m is achieved with a broad detection range up to 12.5 µ m , and meanwhile realize a removal/recovery rate of 100% in single Hg 2+ solution and 97 ± 2% in industrial wastewater with multiple contamination ions. The detection and removal/recovery performance parameters reported in the study are much better as compared to the recently reported single function detection or removal/recovery systems. This work opens a fresh avenue in tackling the problem of heavy metal pollution using plasmonic Schottky heterostructure based All‐In‐One systems.