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.