Photocatalytic Degradation of Organic Dyes Using ZnO/CeO₂ Nanocomposite Material under Visible Light

Abstract

Nanorods of ZnO/CeO2 were synthesized by thermal decomposition method. The decomposition temperature and formation of composite material were confirmed by the thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) before the synthesis process. The prepared samples were characterized by different techniques. The structural and morphological properties of ZnO/CeO2 nanorods were confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and high resolution scanning electron microscopy (HR-SEM). The chemical composition and specific surface area analysis were done by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method. Further the catalyst was used for photocatalytic degradation of organic dye under visible light irradiation

The influence of mechanochemical activation on the Zn–Ce–O composition properties

“…This fact is in agreement with the literature data which showed the high photocatalytic activity of nanocomposite Zn-Ce-O in other photocatalytic dye decomposition processes (Faisal et al, 2011;Li et al, 2011;Li et al, 2014;Saravanan et al, 2012).…”

“…The promoted effect for ZnO-doped ceria (Kaviyarasu et al, 2016;Li et al, 2002;Lin et al, 2015) or CeO 2 -doped zinc oxide (De Lima et al, 2009;Fan et al, 2013;Saravanan et al, 2012) samples was shown, but many publications demonstrated an improvement of the composition properties at oxides equimolar ratio or near to this value (Barrios et al, 2014;Enjamuri et al, 2016;Hajji et al, 2014;Kumar et al, 2015;Laguna et al, 2011;Li et al, 2011;Li et al, 2012;Xiong et al, 2017, etc. ).…”

“…The different methods of ZnO-CeO 2 compositions' preparation such as precipitation (Avgouropoulos et al, 2008;Barrios et al, 2014;He et al, 2004;Kumar et al, 2015;Lin et al, 2015), sol-gel (Enjamuri et al, 2016;Laguna et al, 2011;Sharma and Pallavi, 2012), flame spray pyrolysis (Xiong et al, 2017), thermal decomposition (Saravanan et al, 2012), hydrothermal treatment (Fan et al, 2013;Ma et al, 2010), solvothermal method (Warule et al, 2012) and combustion (Li et al, 2014) were reported. These methods have some disadvantages connected with the metal salts used as raw materials (necessity of anion removal), utilization of alcohols, polymers, surfactants and thermal treatment after synthesis.…”

“…At the same time, it is generally accepted that the properties of the composites often cannot be considered as a sample superposition of the properties of individual components because of strong surface interactions between closely packed particles in binary oxide systems. Among these systems, ZnO-CeO 2 composite is one of the most promising materials which demonstrates the better properties than individual oxides at its uses as catalyst (Enjamuri et al, 2016;He et al, 2004;Kumar et al, 2015), photocatalyst (Li et al, 2012;Saravanan et al, 2012;Xiong et al, 2017), support of catalyst (Avgouropoulos et al, 2008;Barrios et al, 2014;Laguna et al, 2011), material for electrodes (Fan et al, 2013;Hajji et al, 2014), ultraviolet filter (De Lima et al, 2009;Li et al, 2002), etc.…”

Visible light degradation of textile effluent using nanostructured TiO2/Ag/CuO photocatalysts

“…In this exploration, TiO 2 , Ag and CuO nanomaterials, and nanostructured TiO 2 /Ag/CuO photocatalysts coupled in different weight percentages were synthesized under optimized conditions [10,11] and tested for their degradation efficiency on a model dye and also on an effluent collected from textile industries in Tamil Nadu, India.…”