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Outlining the beneficial photocatalytic effect of ZnS deposition in simplistically developed iron oxide nanocomposites of different stoichiometry

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Abstract

Iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) are promising semiconductor photocatalysts driven under visible light owing to their lower bandgap value compared with other metal-oxide nanoparticles (NPs). Owing to the lower cost, IONPs have been combined with other NPs purposefully. In this study, ZnS was deposited on the three most common types of IONPs i.e., magnetite (Fe3O4), hematite (α-Fe2O3) and Goethite (α-FeOOH), targeting improvement in their photocatalytic response. Using a simplistic wet-chemical approach i.e., pseudo-successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (i.e., p-SILAR), resultant Fe3O4/ZnS, α-FeOOH/ZnS, and α-Fe2O3/ZnS nanocomposites were developed those exhibited higher photocatalytic efficiencies compared to corresponding IONPs. Rhodamine B (RhB) dye was used as a reference for comparative investigation of IONPs without and with ZnS deposition, which revealed that all IONPs were beneficiated with ZnS deposition, however, Fe3O4 responded the most by resulting ~ 3 times higher increase (from 19.3 to 66.5%) in the photocatalytic degradation of RhB. The final order of efficiency for nanocomposites remained as Fe3O4/ZnS > α-FeOOH/ZnS > α-Fe2O3/ZnS nanocomposites. Individual IONPs and their nanocomposites were explored using customary material characterization techniques and their photocatalytic performance was explained in accordance with the qualitative and quantitative statistics using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) as well.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Space Technology, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Muhammad Muteeb Butt, Talha Farooq Khan, Mohsin Muhyuddin, Muhammad Abdul Basit & Sajid Butt

  2. School of Chemical and Materials Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Sector H-12, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    M. Aftab Akram

  3. National Center for Physics, Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Zaka Ansar

  4. Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, Hanyang University, Ansan, 15588, Republic of Korea

    Muhammad Abdul Basit

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  1. Muhammad Muteeb Butt
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Butt, M.M., Khan, T.F., Muhyuddin, M. et al. Outlining the beneficial photocatalytic effect of ZnS deposition in simplistically developed iron oxide nanocomposites of different stoichiometry. Appl. Phys. A 127, 251 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-021-04401-3

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