One step facile synthesis of Zinc oxide carbon nanofiber composite for effective photo-degradation

Abstract

The world is facing the serious problem of water scarcity and lacking access to clean drinkable water. Traditional water treatment methods are well-established but the disinfection strategies are left with some severe side-effects such as producing secondary pollutants which are harmful to human health and also difficult to treat. The current membrane technology is able to produce highly purified water without any harm to water body but suffers the problem of membrane fouling; hence raise the need for pretreatment. These limitations has leaded to the continuous growing research interest in the photocatalyst field, taking advantage of the light energy to produce radicals with high oxidation power and to ultimately mineralize the dissolved water body pollutants. This photocatalytic activity is favored as being non-toxic, efficient and sustainable. This project used a precursor-route method to synthesize one kind of photocatalytic composite – zinc oxide carbon nanofibers (ZnO-CNFs) and investigated its photo-degradation capability in the contaminant dye RhB and AO7. The synthesizing process is favored as it is only taking one simple step to produce the desired product and would be easy to manufacture. The experiment results indicate that the ZnO-CNFs have a very good photo-degradation performance compared with the other photocatalytic samples, say zinc oxide sheets and zinc oxide rods; almost double the performance of the original zinc oxide sheet in photo-degrading RhB and AO7.