Nanohybrid material of Co–TiO2 and optical performance on methylene blue dye under visible light illumination

Abstract

The present study explores the sonochemical route for preparing Cobalt doped Titania (CTN) nanoparticles (NPs). As-prepared CTN NPs were characterized by analytical instruments such as X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET), UV–Visible Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (UV–Vis DRS), and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) to study their structural, optical and morphological properties. The characterisation results confirmed the pure phase of prepared CTN NPs by doping Cobalt into TiO2 nanoparticles via a sonochemical route. Further studies were conducted to characterise CTN NPs and investigated their photocatalytic performance over the decolourisation of model dye pollutant Methylene blue (MB) under visible light illumination. Cobalt doping into TiO2 NPs has led to the reduced bandgap, which possesses excellent pore area (56 ​m2/g), thus CTN NPs acts as a benign visible-light-driven photocatalyst over MB dye that completely degraded (99%) in 75 ​min without oxidising agents. The photodegradation results of CTN NPs were compared with previous reports of other metal-doped TiO2 nanoparticles and found that CTN NPs is the best photocatalyst for the degradation of MB dye.