Enhanced visible light photodegradation activity of RhB/MB from aqueous solution using nanosized novel Fe-Cd co-modified ZnO

Neena D,Xing-Zhong Zhao,Kiran Kumar Kondamareddy,Vasiliy O Pelenovich,Dejun Fu,Pravin Kumar,R K Dwivedi,Dingze Lu,Han Bin,Wei Gao

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-29025-1

Abstract

A series of novel Fe-Cd co-doped ZnO nanoparticle based photocatalysts are successfully synthesized by sol-gel route and characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray emission (EDX), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV-Vis spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) techniques. The photocatalytic activity of ZnO nanoparticles doped with various atomic weight fraction of Fe and Cd has been investigated under visible light irradiation using the Methylene Blue and Rhodamine B dye in aqueous solution. The FeCd (2%):ZnO (ZFC-1) exhibit the highest photocatalytic activity in terms of rate constant as KMB = 0.01153 min−1 and KRhB = 0.00916 min−1). Further, the re-usability of the ZFC-1 photocatalyst is studied which confirms that it can be reused up to five times with nearly negligible loss of the photocatalytic efficiency. Moreover, the role of photoactive species investigated using a radical scavenger technique. The present investigations show that the doping concentration plays significant role in photocatalytic performance. The visible light absorption shown by Fe-Cd co-doped ZnO nanoparticles is much higher than that of undoped body probably due to co-doping, and the charge carrier recombination is decreased effectively which yields a higher photocatalytic performance. The mechanism for the enhancement of photocatalytic activity under visible light irradiation is also proposed.

Highlights

The industrial effluents contain, organic pollutants such as dyes, phenoxyaniline, phenols and their derivatives which are acutely toxic and difficult to biodegrade[1]
We report a successful attempt for the synthesis of the Fe-Cd co-doped ZnO nanoparticles via sol- gel method, and the photocatalytic activity of these nanoparticle photocatalysts were explored by measuring their ability of degradation of Rhodamine B (RhB) and Methylene blue (MB) dyes
A closer observation of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of all samples reveals that the particles size of pure ZnO is more than that of ZFC-x samples, which is in good agreement with X-ray diffraction (XRD) results

Summary

OPEN Enhanced visible light photodegradation activity of

Received: 16 November 2017 Accepted: 19 June 2018 Published: xx xx xxxx using nanosized novel Fe-Cd co-modified ZnO. The photocatalytic activity of ZnO nanoparticles doped with various atomic weight fraction of Fe and Cd has been investigated under visible light irradiation using the Methylene Blue and Rhodamine B dye in aqueous solution. The cadmium doped nanostructure photocatalyst degrades methylene blue up to 80% in 180 mins under visible light irradiation[19]. We report a successful attempt for the synthesis of the Fe-Cd co-doped ZnO nanoparticles via sol- gel method, and the photocatalytic activity of these nanoparticle photocatalysts were explored by measuring their ability of degradation of RhB and MB dyes. We succeeded in re-using Fe-Cd co-doped ZnO catalyst for 5 times without any loss of activity

Results and Discussion

Methods

Author Contributions

Additional Information