Environmentally friendly preparation of zinc oxide, study catalytic performance of photodegradation by sunlight for rhodamine B dye

Abstract

This study includes the photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B (Rh.B) employing a heterogeneous photocatalytic process by using ZnO nanoparticles that was prepared by green sol-gel process. The structural, morphological, and its optical properties of ZnO Photocatalyst was studied using different characterization techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), The influencing factors studied were the amount of the catalyst, the concentration of dye and pH on photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B. The experiments were carried out by irradiating the aqueous solutions of dyes containing photocatalysts with Sunlight. The rate of decolorization was estimated from residual concentration spectrophotometrically. Similar experiments were carried out by varying pH (3-11), amount of catalyst (0.25-2.0 g/L) and initial concentration of dye (5-50 mg/L). The experimental results indicated that the maximum degradation (71%) of dyes was achieved using ZnO photocatalyst at pH 10 after 240 min.