Synthesis and Characterization of Erbium and Neodymium Oxide doped Titanium Oxide Nanocomposites and their Application in Visible Light Photocatalysis of Congo red

Abstract

Nanocomposites (NCs) of Titanium dioxide doped with Erbium and Neodymium oxides, ( TiO2[Er2O3 ]x and TiO2[Er2O3 ]x, x=0.1,0.2) were prepared both by chemical co-precipitation followed by hydrolysis (CPH) as well as the solid-state reaction (SSR). The CPH synthesized NCs were obtained with particle sizes in the range (10nm-30nm). TiO2 was also synthesized using precipitation followed by hydrolysis method. All the NCs were investigated for their capability of degrading a dye, Congo Red (CR) using visible light and about 99.6% of CR was degraded. Throughout the entire research, all the chemically synthesized NCs showed high photocatalytic activity and this is attributed to smaller particle size of the NCs as compared to those NCs prepared by the SSR method. This directly reflects that photosensitization is major route of photocatalytic degradation mediated on TiO2 NCs. On comparison with the synthesized TiO2, the doped NCs revealed no greater photocatalytic activity than the synthesized TiO2, however this is apparent since TiO2 was synthesized with similar method to CPH method.