Effect of Graphene in Enhancing the Photo Catalytic Activity of Zirconium Oxide
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Effect of Graphene in Enhancing the Photo Catalytic Activity of Zirconium Oxide Sumita Rani • Mukesh Kumar • Sumit Sharma Dinesh Kumar • Sachin Tyagi
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Received: 2 September 2013 / Accepted: 27 September 2013 / Published online: 24 October 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Graphene, have two-dimensional structure with high conductivity, extremely high specific surface area and superior electron mobility etc. It has been regarded as an important synthesis material for various composite materials used in many applications. Especially, graphene-based semiconductor photo catalysts have attracted extensive attention because of their usefulness in environmental applications such as air cleanup, water disinfection, hazardous waste remediation, and water purification. The present study involves the photo catalytic degradation of methyl orange by photo catalytic process using different concentrations of ZrO2/graphene synthesized at different annealing temperature. A series of zirconium oxide (ZrO2, zirconia) and graphene (Gr) composites with different contents of Gr (5.7, 7.3, 8.3 %) in the composite were synthesized using zirconium oxychloride (ZrOCl28H2O) and graphene oxide as the starting materials. The photocatalytic activities of the synthesized composites were measured for the degradation of methyl orange dye with UV spectroscopy. The rate of decolorization was recorded with respect to the change in intensity of absorption peaks for methyl orange. The absorption peaks, diminished and finally disappeared during reaction, indicating that the dye had been degraded. The photocatalytic activity is strongly affected by the concentration of graphene in the ZrO2. The synthesized ZrO2/graphene photocatalysts are characterized by X-ray diffraction, TGA, Raman spectroscopy and S. Rani M. Kumar (&) S. Sharma D. Kumar Electronic Science Department, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra 136119, Haryana, India e-mail: [email protected] S. Tyagi Central Scientific Instruments Organization, Chandigarh 160030, India
UV–Visible spectroscopy. Finally, it has been concluded that graphene when employed as catalytic support for ZrO2 boost its photo catalytic efficiency. Keywords Photo catalytic Graphene oxide ZrO2 XRD UV–Visible spectroscopy
1 Introduction Photo catalysis, has been recently used for water decontamination [1]. Industries uses color for dyeing their products and unused color is released in water, the dyes used are non-biodegradable and harmful for flora and fauna. Traditional physical techniques used for water decontamination like adsorption on activated carbon, ultra filtration, reverse osmosis, coagulation by chemical agents etc. are only succeed in transferring organic compounds from water to another phase, thus creating secondary pollution [2]. On the other hand advance oxidation processes like Fenton [3] and photo Fenton catalytic reaction [4] are too expensive. In comparison to these techniques photocatalysis is economical and it completely oxidizes the organic pollutants
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