Formation of cobalt doped zinc oxide photocatalyst

Chin, Kean Mun (2017) Formation of cobalt doped zinc oxide photocatalyst. Project Report. Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

The aim of this research is to study the photocatalytic activity of zinc oxide that doped with cobalt. Doping process is one of the method to improve the photocatalytic activity of metal oxide in methyl orange (MO) dye solution. In this research, sol gel method is used to dope the Cobalt (II) acetate tetrahydrate into zinc oxide powder. Besides that, material characterization was done using XRD, FESEM, RAMAN and FTIR in order to identify the structure and morphology of pure ZnO and Co-doped ZnO. XRD was used to confirm the presence of hexagonal wurtzite structure whereas FESEM showed the nanorod and nanodisk morphology of ZnO that presence in the photocatalysts. The degradation performance of methyl orange is affected by the morphology and structure of ZnO. MO dye solution that contain photocatalyst was exposed to UV light irradiation and then analysed the photocatalytic activity of the samples. The concentration of the MO dye solution decreases as exposure time to UV light increases. Surprisingly, the Co doped ZnO photocatalyst shows poorer performance of photocatalytic activity as compared to pure ZnO photocatalyst. This may due to the amount of dopant applied and the oxygen vacancies in the photocatalyst. In this research, after 6 hours irradiation of UV light, the percentage degradation of MO dye solution for pure ZnO (C0), 0.25 wt% Co (C1), 0.5 wt% Co (C2), 1.0 wt% Co (C3), 1.25 wt% Co (C4) and 1.5 wt% Co (C5) are 93%, 77%, 74%, 57%, 39% and 37% respectively.

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