dc.description.abstract |
In recent years, environmental pollution is the most important problem to be solved. As an effective method to control environmental pollution, semiconductor photocatalyst has been widely studied and applied in the field of Photocatalysis. Photocatalytic degradation technology is a new pollutant treatment method, which has the advantages of simple operation, low energy consumption, mild reaction conditions with no formation of secondary pollution. In this study, the effect of irradiation time, pH, initial concentration of wastewater and catalyst loading for the degradation performance of photocatalysts was investigated. The synthesized samples were characterized by XRD, FTIR, SEM and UV-vis spectroscopy. Analysis shows that CuO and Ni-CuO nanoparticles and Ni-CuO/PANI nanocomposites are present with crystalline structures. The XRD patterns ascribed the several sharp and highly intensive diffraction peaks confirms the presence of cubic CuO and Ni-CuO NCs structure with decreasing crystalline size from 37.29 nm and 36.27 nm while further decreased to 1.12 nm after Nanocomposite formation. FTIR results confirm the formation of CuO nanoparticles, Ni-CuO and Ni-CuO/PANI nanocomposites. The energy band gap values of CuO, Ni-CuO and Ni-CuO-PANI composites were found to be equal to 4.07, 3.87 and 3.81 eV respectively.
The degradation of wastewater effluent on CuO, Ni-CuO and Ni-CuO-PANI under different pH, initial dye concentration and load of photocatalyst, was examined. Ni-CuO-PANI proved to be very effective catalyst in photocatalytic degradation of wastewater effluent. The maximum decolorization achieved was 97.5% by using Ni-CuO-PANI at 25 oC, pH of 8, and initial concentration of 8 ppm, within 120 minutes under visible light irradiation. Finally, the researchers have reported the photo-catalysis of Ni-CuO/PANI Nano composite is cost effective alternative for the treatment of wastewater containing organic pollutants |
en_US |