Catalytic activity of graphene oxide hybridized ZnWO4 for dyes degradation and oxidation of functionalized benzyl alcohols

Abstract

Recently, nanomaterials have great attention due to their unique size, shape, and crystallinity dependent optical, electronic, magnetic and chemical properties.1 Metal tungstates such as. Bi2WO6, CdWO4, PbWO4, MnWO4 and FeWO4 are inorganic functional nanomaterials and widely used in scintillators materials, sensors, magnetic devices, photocatlaytic and magnetism field.2 Among them, ZnWO4 has a great potential in photocatalytic degradation of organic dye pollutants under UV light illumination.2−3 But, the efficiency is very low because of sunlight captures only 5% while visible light captures the 35%. Hence, this material activity brings to visible region by doping of ions, form hybrids or composites with graphene or CNT. Graphene is a sp2 hybridized carbon with zero band gap energy and has specific physicochemicoelectrical properties thus it shows excellent applications in photocatalysis and organic conversions.4 There have been persistent efforts to load photocatalysts on the structure of graphene oxide (GO) to enhance the photo catalytic activity, but few studies have focused on the surface coating by GO on the photcatalyst for enhancing the photo catalytic efficiency and producing visible photocatalytic activity.