Nuclear chemistry

Catalysis

Composite number

Engineering

Nanoparticle

Metallurgy

Materials science

Methylene blue

Diffuse reflectance infrared fourier transform

Methylene

Precipitation

Nanocomposite

Telecommunications

Computer science

Chemical engineering

Band gap

Surface plasmon resonance

Non-blocking I/O

Physics

Nanotechnology

Organic chemistry

Crystallite

Optics

Degradation (telecommunications)

Diffuse reflection

Composite material

Chemistry

Meteorology

Photocatalysis

Optoelectronics

Ceramics International

In the present study, NiO–ZnO–Ag photocatalytic nanocomposites were synthesized using two-stage precipitation method. The synthesized composite powders were investigated and characterized using different techniques including XRD, FESEM, FT-IR, TGA and UV–Vis. XRD results showed that by increasing the Ag content, the crystallite size of ZnO decreased. FESEM micrographs showed that addition of Ag could lead to formation of more uniform particles in the size range of 30–500 nm. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy results confirmed that addition of Ag nanoparticles led to the increase of light absorption, which was attributed to the plasmon surface resonance of Ag. Band gap energies of NiO–ZnO, NiO–ZnO–5%Ag, NiO–ZnO–3%Ag, NiO–ZnO–1%Ag and ZnO–1%Ag were estimated to be 3.13, 3.14, 3.147, 3.19 and 3.17 eV, respectively. Investigation of degradation process showed that by adding up to 1 wt% Ag to NiO–ZnO composite led to the increase of methylene blue degradation from 67% to 94%, but further addition resulted in decrease of degradation.

Facile synthesis and investigation of NiO–ZnO–Ag nanocomposites as efficient photocatalysts for degradation of methylene blue dye