Photocatalytic degradation enhancements of dyes with bi-functionalized zones of modified nanoflower like TiO2 with Pt-C3N4 under sunlight irradiation

Behzad Rezaei, Reihaneh Soleimany, Ali A. Ensafi, Neda Irannejad

A B S T R A C T
In this work, a novel method was proposed to photodegradation of organic dyes as important pollutants in wastewaters of textile industries. A one-step hydrothermal method was used to directly synthesis nanoflower like TiO2 on ordinary glass (OG) and modified with Pt-C3N4 nanotubes (NFs TiO2/Pt-C3N4) via electrophoretic deposition (EPD) method. Its photocatalytic activity investigated for degradation of three dyes under sunlight irradiation. The properties of NFs TiO2/Pt-C3N4 NTs were characterized by SEM, FT-IR, EDS, and XRD. Reduction of band gap energy and improvement of light absorption in the visible region for the modified photocatalyst were evaluated by using Tauc’s plot method. The experimental result showed that the NFs TiO2/ Pt-C3N4 NTs achieved degradation efficiency of<97% at 240 min, towards methylene blue (MB), methyl violet (MV) and malachite green (MG) which are higher than pure TiO2 (68%, 83%, and 71%, respectively). Also as a new strategy, a part of the NFs TiO2/Pt-C3N4 NTs was used as a photoanode of the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) and the other part, placed at a solution as a degradation zone. So with this bi-functionalized system, the degradation time was reduced from 240 min to 120 min with the same degradation efficiency.

Keywords:
Nanoflowers of TiO2, Pt-C3N4 nanotubes, Photodegradation, Bi-Functionalized system, Dye-sensitized solar cells