Abstract

Environment friendly and cost-effective structure-directing agents (SDAs) are highly desirable for the development of purposely designed functional nanomaterials. To comply, we aimed to explore vegetable waste extracts as potential SDAs for the synthesis of ZnO–CuO nanocomposites. Extracts of wastes of three different vegetables (cauliflowers, potatoes, and peas) were used, and their impact upon crystal structure, morphology, optical-band-gap (E_g), and photocatalytic efficiency of ZnO–CuO was explored. XRD and SEM revealed that the crystallite size and morphology varied with the vegetable waste extract. Similarly, the wide E_g of n-type ZnO narrowed upon coupling with p-type CuO, and also varied significantly with the vegetable waste extract. The resulting ZnO–CuO nanocomposites were used as photocatalysts for the degradation of model environmental pollutant (an organic dye) under visible light, and it was found that 95.6%, 93%, and 91.3% of the dye decomposes in 120 min under ZnO–CuO photocatalysts synthesized using cauliflower, peas, and potatoes waste extracts, respectively.

摘要

对于专门设计的功能纳米材料的开发，非常需要环保且经济高效的结构导向剂（SDA）。为达到这一要求，我们旨在探索植物废料提取物，作为潜在的SDA，用于合成ZnO-CuO纳米复合材料。使用了三种不同蔬菜（花椰菜，土豆和豌豆）的废液提取物，研究了它们对ZnO-CuO的晶体结构，形态，光学带隙（E _g）和光催化效率的影响。XRD和SEM表明，微晶的大小和形态随植物废液的提取而变化。类似地，宽È_克的Ñ型ZnO变窄在与耦合p-CuO的类型，并且随植物废料提取物的变化也很大。所得的ZnO-CuO纳米复合材料用作光催化剂，用于在可见光下降解模型环境污染物（一种有机染料），发现95.6％，93％和91.3％的染料在ZnO-下120分钟内分解。用花椰菜，豌豆和土豆废提取物合成的CuO光催化剂。