Photodegradation of methyl orange dye by ZnO loaded onto carbon xerogels composites

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• 作者：Hala K. Farag ; Reham M. M. Aboelenin and Nady A. Fathy
• 刊名：Asia-Pacific Journal of Chemical Engineering
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January/February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：12
• 期：1
• 页码：4-12
• 全文大小：307K
• ISSN：1932-2143

文摘

The present paper studies the photocatalytic behavior of pure zinc oxide (ZnO) and ZnO loaded onto carbon xerogel as a substrate. These samples were prepared by a sol-gel process in presence of either an ionic liquid or an alcohol such as 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoromethylsulfonate (A) or isopropanol solvent (B) to produce ZnO-CX-A and ZnO-CX-B photocatalysts, respectively. Transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction proved that ZnO particles were prepared as nanoflakes-like with amorphous phase. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy showed that ZnO-CX-A has a variety of surface functional groups that accelerated the photocatalytic activity of composite. The photocatalytic activity of the prepared photocatalysts was evaluated using methyl orange (MO) azo dye as a model organic compound under visible light source. As a result of the photodegradation experiments, the MO dye was completely degraded by the prepared ZnO-CX photocatalyst composites in 120 min rather than that performed using ZnO and CX photocatalysts. However, a 98% of the MO dye solution was degraded within 90 min over ZnO-CX-A. The separation and reusability runs of ZnO-CX-A photocatalyst showed that the catalyst has high photodegradation efficiencies reaching up to 90% in the fourth run and afterward decreased to 60% in the fifth reuse.