Hydrothermal synthesis of Ce2Sn2O7 nanoparticles for effective sonocatalytic performance

Abstract

The Ce2Sn2O7 nanoparticles were successfully synthesized using a simple hydrothermal method. The crystal structure, morphology, and optical property of Ce2Sn2O7 nanoparticles were analyzed by X-ray diffraction patterns, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and UV–visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. The nanomaterial was first applied to ultrasonic catalytic degradation. The sonocatalytic activity of Ce2Sn2O7 nanoparticles was evaluated at room temperature and in the dark by using the Methyl Orange (MO) as the simulated contaminant. The effects of ultrasonic output power, Ce2Sn2O7 addition amount, initial concentration of pollutants, pH of solution, types of organic dyes and other factors on the catalytic degradation efficiency were investigated. The experiment results show that the ultrasonic catalytic degradation reaction of MO by the Ce2Sn2O7 nanoparticles basically follows the pseudo first-order kinetic model. Under the best conditions, the ultrasonic catalytic degradation rate of Methyl Orange reaches 97.8%, and the degradation rate can still reach 82.6% after four cycles of experiments. These results indicate that Ce2Sn2O7 nanoparticles can be used as acoustic catalyst for the purification of organic wastewater, which has a good application prospect.