Visible light‐assisted degradation of binary mixture of dyes using purple tea‐mediated zinc oxide nanoparticles

Abstract

AbstractThis work presents completely a new, green, and non‐expensive route of synthesis of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles (NPs) using purple tea leaves. The crystalline nature of purple tea‐mediated ZnO NPs (PT‐ZnO NPs) was confirmed by XRD and SAED analyses. Further characterizations of PT‐ZnO NPs were done using UV‐vis spectroscopy, FTIR spectroscopy, SEM‐EDX, and TEM. The size of synthesized NPs was calculated to be 15.1 nm which presented spherical morphology with some sorts of agglomeration. The PT‐ZnO NPs when applied as visible light‐driven photocatalyst for degradation of dyes, Malachite green (MG) and Rhodamine B (RB) showed that degradation was found to be higher in their binary solution (MG‐RB) than in their single solution (MG/RB). MG 95% and RB 35% was degraded in their binary solution where as in their respective single dye solution MG 89% and RB 22% got degraded within the experimental time. The highly pure, PT‐ZnO NPs are considered to have comparable photocatalytic activity with respect to most of the reported works and hence might find a way for its practical application for waste water treatment in the real world. The PT‐ZnO NPs could be reused at least for five times without any significant loss in degradation efficiency.