Chiral Biomineral Structures: Synthesis and Inspiring Functional Materials.

Biominerals with complex hierarchical structures present important roles, such as defense, predation, or communication, which spurs the scientists to design biomimetic strategies and mimic this microstructure. This review mainly focuses on the synthesized strategies of chiral biominerals and the inspirations in the design of the functional materials. Additive-assisted and template-oriented strategies can control mineral growth through intermolecular interactions, which triggers the chirality transfer from the molecular level to the macroscopic scale.

Effective visible light-active boron and europium co-doped BiVO4 synthesized by sol-gel method for photodegradion of methyl orange.

Eu-B co-doped BiVO4 visible-light-driven photocatalysts have been synthesized using the sol-gel method. The resulting materials were characterized by a series of joint techniques, including XPS, XRD, SEM, BET, and UV-vis DRS analyses. Compared with BiVO4 and B-BiVO4 photocatalysts, the Eu-B-BiVO4 photocatalysts exhibited much higher photocatalytic activity for methyl orange (MO) degradation under visible light irradiation.

High performance B doped BiVO4 photocatalyst with visible light response by citric acid complex method.

A B-doped BiVO4 photocatalyst was synthesized by citric acid complex method and using H3BO3 as the dopant source, and the photocatalyst was characterized with XPS, XRD, SEM, BET and UV-Vis DRS. The photocatalytic activity was evaluated by the photocatalytic degradation of a methyl orange (MO) solution under visible light. This assay revealed that both the pure BiVO4 and all of the B doped samples were the monoclinic phase.