Enhancing Photocatalyst Performance of Magnetic Surfaces Covered by Carbon Clouds for Textile Dye Degradation

Abstract

The development of the clothing industry contributes to the advancement of contemporary lifestyles, albeit with possible adverse implications for waste management. Photocatalysis process is a promising solution to degrade pollutants like methylene blue from textile waste. Iron sand/carbon (2.5 g:2.5 g) composites have been investigated and fabricated as catalysts using simple mechanical alloying for 30 min at 10 Hz as a green technique. By utilizing XRD, FTIR, UV–Vis, and SEM, the structural, optical, dielectric properties and surface states were investigated. IS/C/NaCl exhibits the highest performance with a degradation performance is achieved to 94.6%. The high longitudinal optical phonon vibration position, low penetration depth, and smaller crystallite size have a strong correlation to improve the degradation performance. The large surface area provided by the presence of carbon has an important effect on surface interactions to tune photocatalytic activity. It found that 0.25 g composite had a mass that was qualified to be applied to 100 mL dye solution for (15%, 30%, and 60%) MB concentrations. As additionally, the finding of high photocatalytic performance > 90% exhibited from all composites, indicating that the magnetite covered by carbon cloud is expected to be potential and promising catalyst for MB.