To promote the development of iron oxide-based photocatalysts and its application in the field of water environment remediation

the key is to tackle the issues of insufficient thermodynamic reaction capacity of electrons and poor surface catalytic sites for O2 catalytic activation due to the positive conduction band bottom position of iron oxide. In this regard

modulating the photo-generated electrons via modification on the controlled nano-sized iron oxide is an effective method for improving the photocatalytic activity of iron oxide. In this work

small sized pure α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles were synthesized by a urea modulate phase separation hydrolysis-solvothermal method. Based on this

the α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles were controllably modified by copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) through a simple wet chemical method. Results show that the as-prepared optimized sample (mass fraction of CuPc and α-Fe2O3 is 1%) exhibited nearly 2.5 times enhancement for photocatalytic 2

4-DCP degradation compared with the pure α-Fe2O3 sample. Through DRS

Raman

and FT-IR

it was revealed that CuPc and α-Fe2O3 had an effective interface connection by hydrogen bonding. Based on the analysis of hydroxyl radicals test and electrochemical test

the enhanced photocatalytic degradation activities could be attributed to the significantly improved photo-generated charge separation and the promoted O2 activation. In addition

the characteristic absorption of CuPc in longer wavelengths could further extend the range of visible-light response of the nanocomposites. Significantly

this efficient strategy can also be applied to other metal phthalocyanine materials for the modification of α-Fe2O3.