Photocatalytic Degradation of Murexide Dye Using Undoped Silver Oxide and Iron-Doped Silver Nanoparticles

Abstract

Fe-doped Ag2O and undoped Ag2O nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized using chemical co-precipitation. The obtained samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), which was used to identify the crystallite size of the fabricated nanoparticles. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX) were used for the morphological studies and elemental confirmation, respectively Fourier Transform Infra- Red (FT-IR) spectroscopy was used to detect functional groups. XRD results indicated that the silver oxide particles were crystalline with crystallite sizes 32nm and 29nm, respectively. The synthesized nanoparticles were used as photo-catalysts for the degradation of murexide dye by using double-bond UV-VIS. The effects of various parameters on photocatalyst i.e. contact time; effect of catalytic dose, and effect of pH were studied. The optimized time for dye decomposition was 100 minutes. The most favorable temperature for degradation was 50 C. For both silver oxide and iron-doped silver oxide, the optimum catalyst dosage was 0.04 g. However, the result shows that the maximum degradation took place at pH 10, the optimum degradation for iron-doped silver oxide was observed to be 92% and 83% for silver oxide.