A Study of Synthesis and Applications of and#946; cyclodextrin Based Nanocomposites in Photocatalytic Degradation of Organic Pollutants

Abstract

In the present situation, clean water availability is a great challenge. Nanotechnology plays a promising role in the degradation of pollutants in water and air. Among all types of mostly used nanomaterials, and#946;-CD based nanomaterials are also used as photocatalysts for pollutants removal from wastewater. It is also used to inhibit the growth of microbes. newline A number of different types of industries are dumping out their waste directly into nearby water resources without any prior treatment; and increasing the already existing water pollution to a higher level. So now there is a need to create an alternate advance technology for wastewater treatment and in this context; an advance oxidation technology with green chemical approach has been found for wastewater treatment i.e. photocatalysis. Wastewater generally contains different toxic organic pollutants having a number of adverse effects on human health and the aquatic life upon exposure. Photocatalysis process has many advantages like atmospheric pressures, cheap prices and normal temperatures and, also no creation of secondary waste and being readily available and easily accessible. newline Photocatalysts produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) on illumination with solar light which further degraded the pollutants into less harmful products like H2O and CO2 etc. As photocatalysts also have some limitations like limited absorption of visible light, fast recombination of charge particles, and broad band gap which decreases their photocatalytic activity. To improve these limitations there are some methods like doping of metal or non-metal, by inserting carbon-based material like CDs, fullerene, carbon nanotube (CNT) or forming composite form etc. newline In the present work, different metal oxides (ZnO, CuO, Fe2O3 nanoparticles (NPs)), binary metal oxides (CuO/ZnO), ternary metal oxides (CuO/Fe2O3/ZnO) and their nanocomposites (NCs) are synthesized with and#946;-CD. The above synthesized nanocomposites are characterized by P-XRD, FT-IR, UV-DRS, SEM-EDAX, TGA/DTA, HR-TEM