Abstract
TiO2-based materials are commonly employed as photocatalysts for industrial wastewater treatment. The primary reasons of employing TiO2 include cost effectiveness, ready availability, eco-friendliness, non-toxic behavior, and exceptional resistance towards photo-corrosion. However, the wider band gap of pure TiO2 restricts its performance because of its optical absorption of solar light to the ultraviolet (UV) region only, and to some extent of photo-excited charge recombination. In the present work an attempt is made to develop a facile synthesis approach by using urea, a cheap chemical precursor, to form nitrogen doped TiO2 with the key objective of extended light absorption and thus enhanced photocatalytic performance. It was also observed that the urea-induced anatase phase enrichment of TiO2 is another key factor in promoting the photocatalytic performance. The photocatalysts prepared by varying the amount of urea as a nitrogen dopant precursor, are characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and photoluminescence (PL) to evaluate their crystallinity, morphology, functional groups, and charge separation properties, respectively. Moreover, the surface area was also estimated by physicochemical adsorption. The maximum nitrogen-doped sample yielded >99% photodegradation efficiency of methylene blue (MB) dye-simulated wastewater as compared to a pure TiO2 sample which exhibited 6.46% efficiency. The results show that the simultaneous factors of nitrogen doping and anatase phase enhancement contributes significantly towards the improvement of photocatalytic performance.
Highlights
The industrial contamination of water, soil, or air, has always been an alarming issue for the human beings and life on Earth [1,2,3,4]
The obtained samples were washed with DI water, dried at 100 ◦C in an oven for 24 h followed by calcination at 450 ◦C for 5 h in a muffle furnace resulting in yellow colored nitrogen-doped TiO2 (NT) samples
All the peaks of anatase phase are increased with the increment of the urea amount
Summary
The industrial contamination of water, soil, or air, has always been an alarming issue for the human beings and life on Earth [1,2,3,4]. The toxins present in textile wastewater consist of unmanageable toxic-colored dyes, surfactants, along with many chlorine-containing amalgams [3,5,7]. These dyes have the ability to persist in the environment for a prolonged time. As reported approximately 70% of industrial wastewater consists of azo dyes [7] These azo dyes are cancer-causing and mutagenic in nature. They come into the body through incorporation as well as processing via gastric microbes and harming human and animal life
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