Mesoporous Cu-Doped Manganese Oxide Nano Straws for Photocatalytic Degradation of Hazardous Alizarin Red Dye

Muhammad Hamza; Ataf Ali Altaf; Samia Kausar; Shahzad Murtaza; Amen Shahpal; Muhammad Hamayun; Muhammad Tayyab; Komal Rizwan; Hamza Shoukat; Anum Maqsood

doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c03736

Mesoporous Cu-Doped Manganese Oxide Nano Straws for Photocatalytic Degradation of Hazardous Alizarin Red Dye

ACS Omega. 2023 Sep 22;8(39):35956-35963. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.3c03736. eCollection 2023 Oct 3.

Authors

Muhammad Hamza¹, Ataf Ali Altaf^{2

3}, Samia Kausar¹, Shahzad Murtaza⁴, Amen Shahpal⁵, Muhammad Hamayun¹, Muhammad Tayyab⁶, Komal Rizwan⁷, Hamza Shoukat¹, Anum Maqsood⁸

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, University of Gujrat, Hafiz Hayat Campus, Gujrat 50700, Pakistan.
² Department of Chemistry, University of Okara, Okara 56300, Pakistan.
³ Department of Food Science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, United States.
⁴ Institute of Chemistry, Khwaja Fareed UEIT, Rahim Yar Khan 64200, Pakistan.
⁵ Department of Chemistry and Catalysis Research Center, Technical University of Munich, Lichtenbergstrasse 4, Garching 85747, Germany.
⁶ Key Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Institute of Fine Chemicals, School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
⁷ Department of Chemistry, University of Sahiwal, Sahiwal 57000, Pakistan.
⁸ Department of Physics, The University of Lahore, Lahore 53700, Pakistan.

Abstract

The present work reports the photocatalytic degradation of alizarin red (AR) using Cu-doped manganese oxide (MH16-MH20) nanomaterials as catalysts under UV light irradiation. Cu-doped manganese oxides were synthesized by a very facile hydrothermal approach and characterized by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, powder X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller analysis, UV-vis spectroscopy, and photoluminescence techniques. The structural, morphological, and optical characterization revealed that the synthesized compounds are nanoparticles (38.20-54.10 nm), grown in high mesoporous density (constant C > 100), possessing a tetragonal phase, and exhibiting 2.98-3.02 eV band gap energies. Synthesized materials were utilized for photocatalytic AR dye degradation under UV light which was monitored by UV-visible spectroscopy and % AR degradation was calculated at various time intervals from absorption spectra. More than 60% AR degradation at various time intervals was obtained for MH16-MH20 indicating their good catalytic efficiencies for AR removal. However, MH20 was found to be the most efficient catalyst showing more than 84% degradation, hence MH20 was used to investigate the effect of various catalytic doses, AR concentrations, and pH of the medium on degradation. More than 50% AR degradation was obtained for all studied parameters with MH20 whereas the pseudo-first-order kinetic model was found to be the best-fitted kinetic model for AR degradation with k = 0.0015 and R² = 0.99 indicating a significant correlation between experimental data.