Metal oxide nanomaterials for photocatalytic degradation of antibiotics

Abstract

Due to their ability to produce charge carriers when stimulated with the necessary amount of energy, metal oxides have significant technological significance in electronics and environmental cleanup. Most metal oxides can be used as photocatalysts thanks to the promising configuration of their electronic structure, light absorption capabilities, and charge transport features. The definition of metal oxides as photocatalysts, structural properties, requirements for the photocatalysts, classification of photocatalysts, and the mechanism of the photocatalytic process is covered in this article. Water pollution originating from various factors such as metal ions, textile dyes, pharmaceutical wastes, and another household, and industrial activities is posing a great threat to various kinds of life on this planet. Polluted water is treated through various methodologies like electrochemical, chemical precipitation, adsorption, ion exchange, reverse osmosis, flotation, coagulation-flocculation, etc. Nanotechnology is playing a great role in developing new and advanced methods with greater efficiency for water purification. Metal oxides are such a class of nanomaterials, that a vast amount of research is carried out in exploring their properties and applying them for pollutant removal from contaminated water. Antibiotics are one category of pollutants whose concentration in various water resources is increasing at an alarming rate. Removal of antibiotics from the water has been an area of focus among various researchers worldwide and a lot of work has been done in this field. Different nanomaterials including metal oxides have been investigated for the removal of antibiotics. Therefore, this article in specific reviews the research work done on the removal of antibiotics from the water using various metal oxides such as zinc oxide, silver oxide, titanium oxide, and iron oxide. In the nanoscale, zinc oxide has shown remarkable properties which make it a potential photocatalyst for degradation antibiotics. Titanium oxide nanomaterials are one kind of important and promising photocatalyst because of their oxidizing power.