Surface modification of Ag–CdO with polyaniline for the treatment of 3′,3″,5′,5″-tetrabromophenolsulfonphthalein (BPB) under UV-visible light irradiation

The quality of natural waters could be deteriorated by organic pollutants which can impose a risk to the ecosystem as well as human health. These organic contaminants are often needed to be removed with adequate techniques. In this study, the photocatalysts of CdO nanoparticles (NPs), Ag–CdO nanocomposites (NCs), and Ag–CdO/polyaniline (PANI) NCs were successfully synthesized in order to investigate their degradation performance against 3′,3″,5′,5″-tetrabromophenolsulfonphthalein (bromophenol blue, BPB) dye. The crystal structure, functional groups, morphological change, and degradation efficiency of as-synthesized photocatalysts were characterized using XRD, FTIR, SEM and UV-Visible spectroscopic techniques respectively. The SEM result showed that the surface morphology of the nanomaterials seems the agglomerated micron-scaled grains as compared to CdO NPs and Ag–CdO NCs. The FT-IR spectrum demonstrated the absorption peaks which strongly confirmed that Ag–CdO NCs surface was successfully modified with PANI. The highly sharp and intensive XRD patterns attributed to the cubic structure for CdO NPs and Ag–CdO NCs structures with decreasing crystalline size from 40.58 nm to 36.43 nm and 10.29 nm upon CdO NPs photocatalyst surface treatment with Ag metal and PANI. The decreased particle size brought about to narrow the bandgap from 2.76 eV to 1.61 eV and 1.58 eV respectively. Among the synthesized photocatalysts, Ag–CdO/PANI NCs exhibited the best degradation efficiency of 97.30 % at pH 6, 10 ppm concentration of dye, 0.140 g of catalyst load, and 210 min irradiation time. Moreover, the kinetics of photodegradation of model dye at optimum conditions followed pseudo-second order reaction with the rate constant of 8.56 × 10-2 M-1min-1. The results suggested that, the developed treatment method for this particular dye could be applicable for the treatment of wastewater samples containing acidic dyes.