Flower like SnO2-Fe2O3-rGO ternary composite as highly efficient visible light induced photocatalyst for the degradation of organic pollutants from contaminated water

Abstract

The ternary composites are facile, eco-friendly materials with high porosity, great surface region and much more other improved properties than pristine metal oxides. In view of that, we have fabricated ternary nanocomposites SnO2–Fe2O3–rGO (SFR) by using different GO loadings (0.5, 1, 3 and 5%) were acquired through hydrothermal synthesis and as synthesized composites were further characterized by FTIR, XRD, TEM, FESEM, EDX, Raman, PL, DRS and UV–vis spectrophotometer. SnO2 exhibits a flower-like structure with a smooth surface and SnO2-Fe2O3 distributed among rGO layer which indicates SFR composite is flexible and suitable to use as good photocatalyst. EDX spectrum and XRD patterns confirmed that synthesized SFR ternary composite was formed purely without impurities. The bandgap energy also measured for prepared all samples, of them SFR-1% composite exhibits lesser (1.78 eV) hence possess better photocatalytic efficiency. Visible light irradiations contributes great photocatalytic efficacy of characterized samples over model dye contaminant Methylene blue (MB) which completely degraded (98.3%) by SFR-1% composite in 3 h. The outstanding photocatalyst SFR-1% composite can be recycled and stable for successive five runs. Meanwhile, two more pollutants like 4-Aminophenol (4-AP) and Crystal violet (CV) were also significantly degraded by hydrothermally synthesized ternary nanocomposite (SFR-1%) efficiently and compared the degradation rates with binary composite (SnO2-Fe2O3) and pure metal oxides. The results stated that SFR-1% composite showing greater photocatalytic efficacy for the degradation of dye contaminants.