Effect of calcination temperature on the morphology and photocatalytic activity of Bismuth oxide

Abstract

Bismuth oxide can be synthesized by sol-gel (SG) method with variety of calcination temperature. Bismuth oxide (Bi2O3) is a pale-yellow solid which has 2 to 3.96 eV band gap, high photocatalytic activity, and electrical conductivity so that this material has the potential properties as the basic material of solid electrolyte fuel cells and photocatalyst. In this research, synthesis of bismuth oxide was undertaken using sol-gel method with variety of calcination temperatures, i.e. 500 °C, 600 °C, dan 700 °C. Calcination temperature is one factor that affects the synthesis product, so this research aims to determine the effect of calcination temperature to the resulting synthesis products. The synthesis of bismuth oxide by this method was conducted by dissolving Bi(NO3)3.5H2O and citric acid in HNO3, then added PEG 6000. The results showed that bismuth oxide synthesized using sol gel method with variety of calcination temperature have different crystal structure. While, the photocatalytic activity indicated that bismuth oxide synthesized with calcination temperature at 700 0C gave best performance on degradation of methyl orange.