Enhanced Role of Biopolymers in the Photocata...

Enhanced Role of Biopolymers in the Photocatalysis of Metal oxide doped Biopolymer Nanocomposites upon Methylene blue and Congo red dyes

Author Name : T. Uma Rajalakshmi, G.Alagumuthu

ABSTRACT

In recent years, metaloxide doped biopolymer nanocomposites have received great attention because of their remarkable applications not limited to photocatalysis. Biopolymers enhance the photocatalytic activity of metaloxides resulting in improved structural and functional modifications, as the development of novel photocatalysts is crucial for the progress in research in chemical sciences. Nanoparticles have evolved to nanocomposites thereby attracting enormous applications including photocatalysis.Polymer based nanocomposites have better photocatalytic efficiency than pure ZnO through two considerations, one by reducing electron hole recombination rate by stabilising the excited electron in the conduction band which can be achieved by doping thepolymer nanocomposite with metal oxide and the other by decreasing the band energy of the semiconductors by forming nanocomposite between ZnO and other polymers.One such effort has been carried out to synthesize, characterize and photocatalytically degrade certain dyes.The characterisation of the synthesised nanocomposites was done by Xray diffraction, FTIR, scanning electron microscopy, atomic flame microscopy, UV visible absorption spectroscopy and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. It was observed that the metaloxide nano particles were uniformly dispersed on the biopolymer surface with average particle size of 25-50 nm and the synthesised nano composites proved excellent photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue and congo red dyes.

Keywords: Biopolymers,  Metaloxide,  Nanocomposites,  Photocatalysis