Experimental and numerical study on photocatalytic activity of the ZnO nanorods/CuO composite film
Dung The Nguyen, Minh Duc Tran, Thanh Van Hoang, Duc Thien Trinh, Duc Thang Pham, Duc Thang Pham, Nguyễn Đình Lâm, Nguyễn Đình Lâm
Abstract
Abstract The photocatalytic activity of the ZnO NRs/CuO composite film was investigated by using both experimental and numerical methods. The ZnO NRs/CuO composite film exhibits significantly enlarge absorption range to visible-light and suppress the recombination rate of the photogenerated electron-hole pairs, which can be well utilized as a photocatalyst. The ZnO NRs/CuO composite film also presents good stability, and reusability, and durability for photo-decomposition purpose. The optimal ZnO NRs/CuO composite film contains 1μ-thick of CuO film and 10 nm-thick of ZnO NRs film. The donor concentration in ZnO NRs film should be lower than 10 16 cm −3 . The short circuit current density of the optimal composite film is 25.8 mA/cm 2 resulting in the calculated pseudo-order rate constant of 1.85 s −1 . The enhancement in degradation efficiency of this composite film is attributed to the inner electric field and large effective surface area of ZnO NRs film.