Solar Light Induced Degradation of Methylene Blue using Novel Co3V2O8 /TiO2 Nanocomposite

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Nowadays environmental pollution and health has become the two big serious issues for the future of world. It is necessary to avoid water pollution, which is the most important crisis for the environmental hazardous using different technology. Photo-catalysis is the very significant process by using photocatalyst, which can easily reduce the level of pollutants in aqueous system. The photocatalyst with reduced size, in nanometer scale it can effectively utilized for the photocatalyst and the litereature proved that the nanophotocatalyst shows maximum photocatalytic performance. The higher surface are of the nano material is helpful for the adsorption of pollutant and oxidized to highly stable inorganic substances, which are harmless to the living things. According to Henglein, the nanomaterial can shows effective behavior when compare to bulk material [1]. Surface to volume ratio of nano particles is more, and it leads to high surface energy. The TiO 2 was most widely used photocatalyst, in different industries which was easily available [2,3]. The band gap energy of TiO 2 was 3.2 eV, which has larger energy and it needs high light energy for the excitation electron between valence bond and conduction band. Therefore, this wide band gap energy of TiO 2 caused researcher to think more or other photocatalysts materials for the lower band gap energy. And also they tried to synthesis visible light active photocatalyst, which can able to destruct organic molecules. The researcher found large number photocatalyst for the lower band gap energy such as BiVO 4 [4,5] [25,26] and electrospinning [27]. These types of vanadates has many advantages in different fields such as electrode, supercapacitor, batteries and water oxidation processes [28][29][30][31]. Here, for the first time the composite of Co 3 V 2 O 8 /TiO 2 particle were synthesized by simple hydrothermal method. The synthesized particle was examined with different advanced instruments for the investigation of basic properties like crystalinity, morphology, particle size elemental analysis. It has been demonstrated that the synthesized composite was used for the destruction of organic pollutants present in the water. The ability of synthesized photocatalyst for the destruction of methylene blue dye, under solar light irradiation was investigated. The results show high photocatalytic efficiency for the destruction of dyes present in the water system.