Abstract
Our study was focused on the synthesis of photocatalytic materials for the degradation of organic dyes based on the valorization of biomass resources. The biochar resulted from pyrolysis process of cherry pits wastes was activated by CO2 flow. Activated and inactivated carbon was used to obtain carbon-based photocatalysts impregnated with different zinc salt precursors. The activation of carbon had no significant influence on the photodegradation process. The doping procedure used Li2CO3 and Zn(CH3COO)2 of different concentrations to impregnate the biochar. The carbon-ZnO-Li2O based nanomaterials were analysed by TEM and SEM, while the presence of hexagonal wurtzite ZnO was investigated by XRD. The solid samples were analysed by PL at 360 nm excitation fixed wavelength to correlate their morphology with the optical and photocatalytic properties. The presence of Li atoms led to photocatalytic activities of the doped ZnO similar to the undoped ZnO obtained at higher concentrations of zinc acetate precursor.
Highlights
Our study was focused on the synthesis of photocatalytic materials for the degradation of organic dyes based on the valorization of biomass resources
Our approach involved the use of several zinc salts aqueous solutions to impregnate the biochar structure followed by solvent removal and calcination of the biochar and generation of semiconductor materials in order to investigate the effects on the morphology of the obtained ZnO and its photocatalytic activity
Our first step consisted in the investigation of the morphologic structures of the carbon resulted from the pyrolyzed cherry pits (Fig. 1a), respectively activated carbon (Fig. 1b,c)
Summary
Our study was focused on the synthesis of photocatalytic materials for the degradation of organic dyes based on the valorization of biomass resources. Several research studies demonstrated higher efficiencies in terms of decomposition of the organic dyes, and confirmed that www.nature.com/scientificreports the structure, morphology, or the functional groups present on the surface of the biochar are extremely important for the immobilization and/or synthesis of the metal oxides nanoparticles leading to an enhanced photocatalytic degradation process[18,20,21]. The “ex situ” synthesis method is less efficient in terms of interfacial interaction between the semiconducting nanostructures and graphene surface, this procedure offered a better control over the morphology of photocatalytic semiconductors[22]. Our approach involved the use of several zinc salts aqueous solutions to impregnate the biochar structure followed by solvent removal and calcination of the biochar and generation of semiconductor materials in order to investigate the effects on the morphology of the obtained ZnO and its photocatalytic activity
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