Photodegradation of organic dyes using ZnO nanorods grown on AlN film
Abstract
Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods were grown on aluminum nitride (AlN) buffer layer deposited on glass substrate as a photocatalyst for the degradation of dyes. Raman spectroscopy was done to confirm the grown ZnO on the sample. Raman peaks were found at 438 cm-1 and 1165 cm-1. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was done to study the surface morphology and geometric properties of the nanorods. The estimated diameter and length of the nanorods were 139 nm and 2.38 μm, respectively. The efficiency of the fabricated photocatalyst was then determined via photodegradation testing on organic dyes. Ultraviolet to visible (UV-vis) spectrometer was used to measure the photodegradation efficiency of the photocatalysts on methylene blue (MB) and rhodamine b (RhB). It was found that the ZnO nanorods has a photodegradation efficiency on MB and RhB of 91.77% and 96.24% under 1 hour exposure to UV light, respectively. The results have shown that ZnO nanorods have effectively degraded MB and RhB at 0.0505 μM/min and 0.0597μM/min, respectively.