Sonochemical Synthesis and Characterization of Visible Light Driven CuO@g-C 3 N 4 Nano-Photocatalyst for Eriochrome Black T Dye Degradation in Industrial Dye Effluent

In this work, we report a facile sonochemical method for synthesising CuO, g-C 3 N 4 nanoparticles and CuO@g-C 3 N 4 nanocomposite materials and the as-synthesized materials were well characterized using various analytical such as XRD, FE-SEM, EDX, FTIR, Raman, EIS, UV-visible, UV-DRS, PL and XPS techniques. The CuO@g-C 3 N 4 nanocomposite photocatalyst was exhibited an excellent photocatalytic degradation effect towards Eriochrome black T ( EBT) dye due to its low optical energy band gap ( E g = 2.74 eV) in aqueous solution at different pH values (2.0–12.0), irradiation time (sec), concentrations of catalyst, and dye. The greater depth of EBT dye degradation (98.17%), pseudo first order rate constant ( k , 0.914 s –1 ) value with correlation coefficient value ( R 2 , 0.99) were achieved at pH 12.0 using 5 × 10 –3 M of photocatalyst and 5 × 10 –2 M of EBT dye for 700 sec irradiation. The obtained spectral, kinetic results were ascribed that the degradation of EBT dye was pH dependent and the radicals involved in the photocatalytic EBT dye degradation pathway (Type-1 p – n heterojunction photocatalyst). The present CuO@g-C 3 N 4 nanocomposite photocatalyst was showed an excellent stability and reusability even after using 15 consecutive cycles. In real sample analysis, the spiked industrial dye effluent samples was exhibited >90% dye degradation efficiency using CuO@g-C 3 N 4 nanocomposite as a photocatalyst.