Abstract
Herein, we prepared a novel photocatalytic ZnO-TiO2 loaded carbon nanofibers composites (ZnO-TiO2-CNFs) via electrospinning technique followed by a hydrothermal process. At first, the electrospun TiO2 NP-embedded carbon nanofibers (TiO2-CNFs) were achieved using electrospinning and a carbonization process. Next, the ZnO particles were grown into the TiO2-CNFs via hydrothermal treatment. The morphology, structure, and chemical compositions were studied using state-of-the-art techniques. The photocatalytic performance of the ZnO-TiO2-CNFs composite was studied using degrading methylene blue (MB) under UV-light irradiation for three successive cycles. It was noticed that the ZnO-TiO2-CNFs nanocomposite showed better MB removal properties than that of other formulations, which might be due to the synergistic effects of carbon nanofibers and utilized metal oxides (ZnO and TiO2). The adsorption characteristic of carbon fibers and matched band potentials of ZnO and TiO2 combinedly help to boost the overall photocatalytic performance of the ZnO-TiO2-CNFs composite. The obtained results from this study indicated that it can be an economical and environmentally friendly photocatalyst.
Highlights
Water pollution caused by the presence of organic pollutants has detrimental effects on human beings and aquatic life
On the other hand, when the TTIP/PVP nanofiber mat underwent a direct carbonization process at 800 ◦C for 3 h under an inert atmosphere of argon gas, the titanium tetraisopropoxide decomposed to TiO2 and the PVP was converted to carbon, thereby leading to the formation of TiO2 NP-embedded carbon nanofibers (Figure 1C)
It should be noted that when the zinc oxide (ZnO) particles were loaded into the TiO2-CNFs composite, the size of the ZnO particles was reduced to 50–200 nm in the resulting composite (Figure 3B)
Summary
Water pollution caused by the presence of organic pollutants has detrimental effects on human beings and aquatic life. The development of an effective material with simultaneous adsorption and photocatalytic dye degradation properties is of great importance in environmental protection [5,6]. The wide bandgap (TiO2: 3.2 eV and ZnO: 3.3 eV), high recombination of photogenerated charge carriers, and poor adsorption property are major drawbacks that limit the practical application of TiO2 and ZnO [16,17]. Due to their wide band gaps, they are active only in the UV-light region, which is less than 5% of the solar light spectrum. Improving photocatalytic activities via modification has become an important task
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