Facile synthesis of different metals doped α-PbO nanoparticles for photocatalytic degradation of Methylene Blue dye

In recent days, metallic oxide semiconductor nanoparticles have drawn attention to the photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants. In the present work, undoped and different metals (Sn, Co, Cu, Ni, and Li)-doped of a-PbO nanoparticles were successfully synthesized by a facile chemical precipitations method. The obtained nanoparticles were further studied by using different characterization techniques. The XRD results confirmed that the prepared nanoparticles were a tetragonal, a-PbO phase crystal structure without mixing other PbO phases. The obtained optical band gaps from UV-vis DRS analysis were 2.03 eV, 2.68 eV, 1.61 eV, 1.78 eV, 1.67 eV, and 2.00 eV for pristine a-PbO, Sn, Co, Cu, Ni, and Li doped a-PbO respectively. From the PL emission, the lowest PL intensity of the doped samples indicated the low recombination of the electron-hole pairs that improved the photocatalytic performance of pristine a-PbO. SEM and EDX were used to analyze the surface morphology and composition of the synthesized nanoparticles, respectively. The photocatalytic activities of the prepared nanoparticles were assessed through the degradation of the Methylene Blue (MB) dye under visible light irradiation. The UV-visible spectrophotometer analysis showed that the MB dye concentration decreased as the irradiation time varied from 20 to 100 min. The results showed that within 100 min, the Sn-doped a-PbO nanoparticles possessed the maximum degradation efficiency compared to other metal-doped a-PbO nanoparticles, with 100% MB dye degradation compared to 94.76% by pristine a-PbO. This was due to the increased visible light harvesting, which aided in the photocatalytic degradation of MB dye.