Sonochemical Synthesis and Characterization of Visible Light Driven CuO@g-C3N4 Nano-Photocatalyst for Eriochrome Black T Dye Degradation in Industrial Dye Effluent
Periyakaruppan Karuppasamy, Samuthirarajan Senthilkumar, O. Ganeshbabu, Sakthivel Pitchaimuthu, M. Sennappan, V. Rajapandian
Abstract
In this work, we report a facile sonochemical method for synthesising CuO, g-C3N4 nanoparticles and CuO@g-C3N4 nanocomposite materials and the as-synthesized materials were well characterized using various analytical such as XRD, FE-SEM, EDX, FTIR, Raman, EIS, UV-visible, UV-DRS, PL and XPS techniques. The CuO@g-C3N4 nanocomposite photocatalyst was exhibited an excellent photocatalytic degradation effect towards Eriochrome black T (EBT) dye due to its low optical energy band gap (Eg = 2.74 eV) in aqueous solution at different pH values (2.0–12.0), irradiation time (sec), concentrations of catalyst, and dye. The greater depth of EBT dye degradation (98.17%), pseudo first order rate constant (k, 0.914 s–1) value with correlation coefficient value (R2, 0.99) were achieved at pH 12.0 using 5 × 10–3 M of photocatalyst and 5 × 10–2 M of EBT dye for 700 sec irradiation. The obtained spectral, kinetic results were ascribed that the degradation of EBT dye was pH dependent and the radicals involved in the photocatalytic EBT dye degradation pathway (Type-1 p–n heterojunction photocatalyst). The present CuO@g-C3N4 nanocomposite photocatalyst was showed an excellent stability and reusability even after using 15 consecutive cycles. In real sample analysis, the spiked industrial dye effluent samples was exhibited >90% dye degradation efficiency using CuO@g-C3N4 nanocomposite as a photocatalyst.