Mo-doped cuo nanomaterial for photocatalytic degradation of water pollutants under visible light

Abstract

Recently, metal oxide-based nano-photocatalysts have gained a great deal of attention in waste water remediation due to their outstanding properties. In this report, a novel Mo-doped CuO nanomaterial was successfully prepared and utilized for the degradation of methylene blue water pollutant. The molybdenum content was varied from 1–5 wt.% to obtain the desired modified CuO based nanomaterials. The crystalline structures of as prepared materials were investigated using the XRD technique, which explored the successful fabrication of monoclinic-structure-based CuO na-nomaterials. For morphological studies, SEM and HRTEM were used, which proved the successful preparation of nanoparticles-based material. SAED was used to check the crystallinity of the sample. EDX and XPS analyses were performed to evaluate the elemental composition of Mo-doped CuO nanomaterials. The optical characteristics were explored via UV-vis and PL techniques. These studies showed that the energy bandgap of CuO decreased from 1.55 eV to 1.25 eV due to Mo doping. The photocatalytic efficiency of Mo-doped CuO nanomaterials was evaluated by degrading meth-ylene blue (MB) under visible light-irradiation. Among different Mo-doped CuO based nanomateri-als, the 4 wt.% Mo-doped CuO sample showed the highest degradation activity against MB dye. These results verified that the optimized material can be used for photocatalytic applications, espe-cially for the purification of waste water.