Abstract:
The shortage of clean and freshwater resources is one of main issue for human civilization in 21 century. The wastewater from various industries, laboratories and
factories causing toxic efforts on the lives of living organism and impose severe
threat to them. The textile industry is one of the biggest consumers of water. The
discharge of different toxic dyes and other organic pollutants cause series concerns
for living organisms due to carcinogenic effects of these materials. TiO2 being cheap,
photo-stable and non-toxic can be use if its photocatalytic activity will increase under
solar light. But TiO2 is only active for UV light which account for 4 % of solar
spectrum. To enhance its photocatalytic activity under visible spectrum of sunlight,
Highly Active TiO2, Er2O3/TiO2, Molybdenum loaded TiO2 and TiO2/Er2O3
photocatalysts were synthesized by Sol-gel method. These synthesized photocatalysts
were investigated by applying X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron
microscopy (SEM), Raman spectroscopy, photoluminescence (PL) emission
spectroscopy, UV-vis spectra, and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET). The
incorporation of Er2O3 into TiO2 and metal loading of molybdenum into reduced the
bandgap of TiO2 from 3.3 eV to 3.25 eV,3.1 eV and 3.09 eV for TiO2-Er2O3, Mo
loaded TiO2 and TiO2-Er2O3.BET analysis revealed the enhancement of surface area
by adding Er2O3 and Mo which is one of the crucial factor to increase the
photocatalytic activity of catalyst. The loading of molybdenum enhanced the
immobilization of carriers that facilitated the photooxidation process and suppressed
the electron-holes recombination as confirmed by the PL spectroscopy. The
photocatalytic activity of these catalysts were evaluated by studying the photodegradation
of Methylene blue (MB) under sunlight over standard condition (1 sun,1 atm). The
incorporation of Erbium oxide and Impregnation of molybdenum into pure titania and
TiO2-Er2O3 increased the degradation efficiency to 37%,58% and 75% respectively.
These results supported the effectiveness of titania modified composite for the degradation of industrial textile dye wastewater under sunlight and can be used for opto-electronics applications.
