Fabrication Of A Nanocomposite Based On ZnO Semiconductor And Study Of Its Photocatalytic Activity And Kinetics For The Degradation Of Methylene Blue Pigment

Water is a precious source that is important to every living things throughout the world. Water covered almost 70 percent on the earth but only 2.5% is indicated as clean water.The minor amount of clean water is used, recycled, and then treated. Increased amount of water usage would generate increased amount of wastewater. Nowadays, various kinds of materials have been employed to remove the contaminants from wastewater, including catalyst (homogenous and heterogenous), adsorbents, membrane from organic and inorganic materials, ozone, etc. Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) is a recently discovered wastewater treatment technology which treats pollutants by generating hydroxyl radicals which are responsible for organic degradation. Due to their strong unselective oxidative power, the hydroxyl radicals oxidize and mineralize almost any organic molecule, yielding CO2 and inorganic ions as final products. Among AOPs, photocatalysis is an interesting alternative process that can remove the emerging contaminants at ambient temperature and pressure by oxidation. Water remediation using sunlight is one of the most promising and cost-effective approaches to mitigate environmental hazards significantly related to the industrial development. In the present work, we report the synthesis of a nanocomposite based On ZnO semiconductor via hydrothermal and facile refluxing approaches for the photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue. XRD analysis verified the crystal structure, phase purity and successful synthesis of the nanocomposite. Moreover, the morphology and elemental composition of the photocatalysts were studied using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) andelectron dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The alignment of energy levels for the synthesized heterostructured photocatalysts was also drawn while using UV-visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). PL, FT-IR and BET were employed to determine the optical, structure and surface properties of the nanocomposite. Finally, the as-synthesized heterostructures were employed as efficient photocatalysts for the degradation of methylene blue under the illumination of UV-visible light. My result indicated that ZnO based nanocomposite can efficiently degrade up to 95 % of dye.