Title
Visible Light-Active Pure and Lanthanum Doped Copper Oxide Nanostructures for Photocatalytic Degradation of Methylene Blue Dye and Hydrogen Production
Author
Rafique, Muhammad, N. r. Khalid, Muneeb Irshad, Falak Shafiq, Muhammad Usman, Yasser Fouad, Muhammad Imran, Muhammad A. Assiri, and Waqar Muhammad Ashraf
Year
2023
Journal
Energy Science & Engineering
Abstract
Clean water and renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly important in the current era, as well as a future challenge, and one of the potential solutions is photocatalysis. In current study, a simple one step hydrothermal technique is employed to fabricate the pure and La doped CuO (0, 1, 3, 5, 7%) photocatalysts. The influence of varying La concentration on structure, morphology and optical properties is determined by SEM, XRD, UV-Visible spectroscopy and PL. SEM showed that synthesized nanostructures are irregular spherical and transform into needle-like nanostructures on increasing La concentration. XRD revealed the monoclinic phase with crystallite size of 15-23 nm. The UV visible spectrum exhibited a decrease in band gap of La doped CuO needle like nanostructures from ultraviolet to visible light. The composition and purity of synthesized nanostructures is evaluated via the EDX spectrum which revealed that needle-like nanostructures are pure without any impurity traces. The synthesized nanostructures were used as a photocatalyst against Methylene Blue (MB) dye to examine their photocatalytic activity. The synthesized CuO-3La photocatalyst exhibited excellent photocatalytic performance of dye degradation and hydrogen production 95.3 μmol h-1g-1 with more than 97% cyclic stability. Therefore, the synthesized La doped CuO nanostructures are potential candidates for photocatalytic water splitting and hydrogen evolution.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Instrument
FP-8200
Keywords
photocatalyst