Facile synthesis of different metals doped α-PbO nanoparticles for photocatalytic degradation of Methylene Blue dye

Abstract

In recent days, metallic oxide semiconductor nanoparticles have drawn attention to the photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants. In the present work, undoped and different metals (Sn, Co, Cu, Ni, and Li)-doped of α-PbO nanoparticles were successfully synthesized by a facile chemical precipitations method. The obtained nanoparticles were further studied by using different characterization techniques. The XRD results confirmed that the prepared nanoparticles were a tetragonal, α-PbO phase crystal structure without mixing other PbO phases. The obtained optical band gaps from UV-Vis DRS analysis were 2.03 eV, 2.68 eV, 1.61 eV, 1.78 eV, 1.67 eV, and 2.00 eV for pristine α-PbO, Sn, Co, Cu, Ni, and Li doped α-PbO respectively. From the PL emission, the lowest PL intensity of the doped samples indicated the low recombination of the electron-hole pairs that improved the photocatalytic performance of pristine α-PbO. SEM and EDX were used to analyze the surface morphology and composition of the synthesized nanoparticles, respectively. The photocatalytic activities of the prepared nanoparticles were assessed through the degradation of the Methylene Blue (MB) dye under visible light irradiation. The UV-Visible spectrophotometer analysis showed that the MB dye concentration decreased as the irradiation time varied from 20 to 100 min. The results showed that within 100 minutes, the Sn-doped α-PbO nanoparticles possessed the maximum degradation efficiency compared to other metal-doped α-PbO nanoparticles, with 100 % MB dye degradation compared to 94.76 % by pristine α-PbO. This was due to the increased visible light harvesting, which aided in the photocatalytic degradation of MB dye.

Boosting photocatalytic activity of β-PbO nanoparticles through metal doping

“…The literature has reported that the undoped/dopant surface could act as regulation sites for separating photoinduced electron-hole pairs and improves photocatalytic performance [18]. Our group recently reported the influence of various metal-doped α-PbO catalysts for the photodegradation of MB dye under visible light irradiation [19]. The results obtained confirmed the significant influence of fabrication methods on the tuning of photocatalyst properties.…”

“…In this study, pristine and metal-doped β-PbO nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized following the method outlined in [19]. For pristine β-PbO, 50 ml of distilled water and 0.5 M Pb(CH 3 COO) 2 .3H 2 O were added to a beaker and stirred until a clear solution formed.…”

Lead Monoxide Nanostructures for Nanophotonics: A Review

“…Apart from that, black-phosphorus-analog lead monoxide (PbO) is also of research interest in recent years owing to its excellent photodetection and nonlinear optical properties [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. PbO is a layer compound which exists in two crystal forms: red tetragonal (α) and yellow orthorhombic (β) forms [ 21 ], both of which have been experimentally synthesized [ 20 , 22 , 23 , 24 ].…”