Visible light photocatalytic activity of PAN-CNTs/ZnO-NH2 electrospun nanofibers

Abstract

The water pollution increases every day due to the increase of the humans needs so a lot of studies were studied for looking the solutions. In this work, we studied the photocatalytic degradation performance of the methylene blue (MB) and the indigo carmine (IC) in an aqueous solution by using the composite nanofiber (PAN-CNTs/ZnO-NH2) under visible light. The electrospinning technique was used to fabricate the PAN-CNTs followed by a chemical crosslinking of ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) on it. FTIR, TEM, SEM and XRD analysis are used to examine the changes of the surface morphology, structure and modification of the fabricated composite nanofiber. This study has proved that PAN-CNTs/ZnO-NH2 get high photodegradation efficiency at a low power intensity (80 lux) and at a short time. A complete degradation has done for the dyes solution after a very short time 29 min and 115 min for IC and MB respectively. There are many factors taking into account during the photodegradation process like the pH of the solution, dyes concentration and the irradiation time. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.