Heterogeneous kinetics of CuO nanoflakes in simultaneous decolorization of Eosin Y and Rhodamine B in aqueous media

Abstract

This study describes the heterogeneous photocatalysis of CuO nanoflakes for the effective degradation of hazardous dyes. The successful synthesis of CuO nanoflakes was carried out by exploiting aqueous chemical growth method. The synthesized material was characterized by versatile analytical tools including XRD, FE-SEM, EDX, AFM, ZP and FT-IR. The engineered CuO reveals nanoflakes texture having average size of 18.3 nm and (− 36.5 ± 3 mV) surface charge with excellent phase purity and crystalline nature. The catalytic kinetics exposed that CuO nanocatalyst exhibits an exceptional degradation over 97% for Eosin Y (EY) and Rhodamine B (RB) dyes in the aqueous medium using minimum catalyst dose of 120 and 140 μg individually and simultaneously, within 3 min of time period under sunlight. Due to ultrafine processing, cost-effective synthetic outline, supreme reduction percentage in short time and intense recyclability with an insignificant decrease in degradation abilities, the proposed nanocatalyst is extremely useful. Consequentially, the nanocatalyst presented here is more useful and realistic, hence can be suggested as an effective candidate for the successful degradation of complex dyes at the commercial level.