Abstract
Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)/zinc oxide (PEDOT/ZnO) nanocomposites were prepared by a simple solid-state heating method, in which the content of ZnO was varied from 10 to 20 wt%. The structure and morphology of the composites were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, ultraviolet-visible (UV-vis) absorption spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The photocatalytic activities of the composites were investigated by the degradation of methylene blue (MB) dye in aqueous medium under UV light and natural sunlight irradiation. The FTIR, UV-vis, and XRD results showed that the composites were successfully synthesized, and there was a strong interaction between PEDOT and nano-ZnO. The TEM results suggested that the composites were a mixture of shale-like PEDOT and less aggregated nano-ZnO. The photocatalytic activity results indicated that the incorporation of ZnO nanoparticles in composites can enhance the photocatalytic efficiency of the composites under both UV light and natural sunlight irradiation, and the highest photocatalytic efficiency under UV light (98.7%) and natural sunlight (96.6%) after 5 h occurred in the PEDOT/15wt%ZnO nanocomposite.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of polymer/inorganic nanohybrid materials [1,2,3]
The adsorption of the methylene blue (MB) dye is 27% under UV light irradiation without catalysis and 17% in dark condition by ZnO particles in 5 h, which suggests that the adsorption of the MB dye under both conditions is very low. All these results revealed that the degradation efficiencies of pure PEDOT and nano-ZnO are lower than those of PEDOT/ZnO nanocomposites under the same conditions
The PEDOT/ZnO nanocomposites in powder form with the content of ZnO varying from 10 to 20 wt% were prepared by a simple solid-state heating method
Summary
There has been an increasing interest in the development of polymer/inorganic nanohybrid materials [1,2,3] Inorganic semiconductors such as ZnO, TiO2, MnO2, and ZrO2 have been extensively investigated as hybrids with polymers having synergetic or complementary properties and behavior for the fabrication of a variety of devices. Among these semiconductors, ZnO has promising applications in electrical engineering, catalysis, ultraviolet absorption, photodegradation of microorganisms, and optical and optoelectronic devices [4,5,6,7,8]. Previous studies demonstrated that conducting polymers incorporated with ZnO could display reasonable catalytic activity under light illumination [9,10,11,12], and the delocalized conjugated structures of conductive polymers have been proven to arouse a rapid photoinduced charge separation and decrease the charge recombination rate in electron transfer processes [13,14]
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