Synthesis and characterization of layered semiconductor composite catalysts for photocatalytic applications

Abstract

Due to rapid growth of population, industrialization and urbanization, soil, air and water bodies as well the aquatic systems were highly polluted. The uncontrollable contamination of existing water bodies throughout the globe by domestic wastes and industrial effluents. Dyes, pharmaceutical wastes from hospitals and animal husbandries and agrochemicals such as insecticides, pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers, etc., contaminate the water bodies to a large extent. The industries such as textile, tanning, dyeing, leather and paint industries discharge large amounts of carcinogenic dyes into water bodies without proper treatment. Hence several attempts have been made in the recent past to degrade the toxic dyes and unmetabolized antibiotics. Although various standard methods such as adsorption, chlorination, coagulation, ozonation, flocculation, bio degradation, etc., have been employed to degrade these dangerous compounds, they still suffer certain limitations. From this perspective, advance oxidation process (AOP) involving photocatalysts is the greener route of detoxifying these hazard our organic compounds. In AOPs techniques organic pollutants are completely mineralized to CO2, water and other nontoxic compounds. The degradation is facilitated by the generation of newlinestrong oxidizing agents such as hydroxyl radicals and superoxide anions in water which can non selectively degrade all kinds of organic molecules. Among the various AOPs, photocatalysis using semiconductor oxide heterostructures with 2D materials have attracted the attention of scientists in the last decade. Among the different nanostructured materials, layered semiconductor nanostructures find extensive applications in diverse fields. newline newline newline