Oxygen Vacancies Enhanced Ozonation toward Phenol Derivatives Removal over Ov-Bi2O3

Phenolic molecules are a kind of toxic organic pollutants commonly discharged from industrial effluents. Catalytic ozonation holds great potential in removing phenolic pollutants and further improving the removal efficiency is still the research focus of this field. In this study, defect engineering was used to construct Bi 2 O 3 with rich oxygen vacancies (denoted as O v -Bi 2 O 3 ). O v -Bi 2 O 3 was found to exhibit efficient activity toward the removal of phenolic derivatives. Combined DFT calculations and experimental results suggest that oxygen vacancies play two important roles: (1) the exposed Bi sites induced by rich oxygen vacancies endow a special bridging O 3 adsorption, which is beneficial to improve the kinetics of O 3 decomposition; (2) O 2 produced during the O 3 decomposition process can be reutilized to generate 1 O 2, which prolongs the utilization efficiency of O 3 . In addition, O v -Bi 2 O 3 was loaded onto carbon fiber, which also demonstrates efficient activity. This work provides an alternative way to design efficient catalysts toward removal of phenolic pollutants via ozone oxidation.