Synthesis and Characterization of Multifunctional Metal Zinc Oxide Hybrid Plasmonic Nanostructures

Abstract

Water contamination due to hazardous water soluble organic dyes and toxic chemicals poses a severe threat to the environment. The excess azo dyes in effluents from textile and dyeing industries are usually resistant to biodegradation. Due to their stability and large degree of organics present in them, these pollutants pose severe ecological problems by depleting the dissolved oxygen content of water and releasing toxic compounds that endanger the aquatic life. During anaerobic treatment, these azo dyes may generate carcinogenic compounds such as aromatic amines. Because of this, purification and detoxification of industrial waste water has been one of the major challenges for the scientific community. Several methods such as adsorption, filtration, sedimentation and photocatalysis are used for the removal of these toxic chemicals and organic pollutants. Photocatalytic degradation, in which the organic pollutants are degraded through photocatalytic oxidation and reduction reactions in the presence of a photocatalyst, is one of the most promising and clean processes used for water purification. Since sun is an abundantly available natural energy source, sun light can be conveniently utilized for the photocatalytic degradation of organic dyes and toxic chemicals in water [1-5]. newlineNanostructured semiconductor photocatalysts such as ZnO and TiO2 have attracted significant attention in recent years because of their wide spread applications in environmental remediation [6, 7]. These photocatalysts exhibit high photocatalytic efficiency for the degradation of toxic organic pollutants that originate from the effluents of textile and dyeing industries. Among the various semiconductor photocatalysts, ZnO has been widely used for photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants in water. ZnO with wide band gap (3.37 eV) and large excitonic binding energy (60 meV) is suitable for a wide range of applications [8-10]. The potential use of ZnO nanostructures with various morphologies such as nanoparticles, nano/microrods ...