A comprehensive study on the photocatalytic activity of CuO-doped ZrO₂–ZnO nanocomposites under visible light

Abstract

The present work aims at synthesizing CuO-doped ZrO₂–ZnO (ZZC) nanocomposites through sol-gel approach under ultrasound condition. The photocatalytic degradation of the basic red 46 (BR46, as a water pollution model) was investigated by ZZC nanocomposites under light-emitting diode (LED) visible irradiation. The characterization of the samples was carried out using instruments such as XRD, FTIR, SEM, TEM, EDAX, BET and DRS. X-ray powder diffraction results confirmed crystal structures and pure crystalline phase formation for the synthesized nanocomposites. The SEM results revealed the nanostructure of the particles. Besides, adding CuO to ZrO₂–ZnO nanoparticle would lead to a consistent increase of the ZrO₂–ZnO band at 405 nm with a red shift to 440 nm. A valuable model to predict behavior, optimization and simulation of purification process was developed by response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN). The BR46 photocatalytic degradation of 85.32 ± 1.75% under LED visible light radiation of 18 W –obtained experimentally at optimized conditions (time 120 min, catalyst loading 25 mg/L, pH 11 and BR46 concentration 5 mg/L) –was comparable to 84.07% and 85.69% resulted from RSM and ANN, respectively.

Keywords:

• LED
• Nanocomposite
• Photodegradation
• Optimization
• ANN

Consent for publication

All authors read and approved the final manuscript. All authors are fully aware of this manuscript and have permission to submit the manuscript for possible publication.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclsoure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors' contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Mohsen Mansouri, Gholamreza Moradi, Mohsen Nademi and Naimeh Setareshenas. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Mohsen Mansouri and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript.

Acknowledgements

M. M. thanks the University of Ilam, for the award research fellowship.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Ilam.