Preparation of cerium and sulfur codoped TiO2 nanoparticles based photocatalytic activity with enhanced visible light

In this work, the preparation and characterization of Titanium dioxide (TiO2) codoped with Cerium (Ce) and Sulfur (S) elements was prepared by a hydrothermal method and their photocatalytic activities have been examined. The attained catalysts were characterized by TEM, XRD, BET, FT-IR and UV-vis DRS measurements for investigating nanostructure, crystal phase, band gap and light-harvesting properties of these samples, respectively. The codoping strategy was approved to decrease together the band gap of TiO2 and the recombination rate of the photo-generated electron-hole pairs. Low concentration doping and codoping with Ce and S with anatase phase in TiO2 nanoparticle from the XRD studies. UV-DRS indicate that the band gap of TiO2 (3.2 eV) reduced to 3.02 eV, 2.89 eV and 2.82 eV, by Ce-doping, S-doping and Ce-S codoping, respectively. The Photocatalytic performance of the samples was tested using the degradation of Methyl Orange (MO) as a function of time. It was observed that the codoped TiO2 provided the highest photocatalytic activity in comparison to the mono-doped and pure TiO2 since of high visible light absorption and likely reduction in the recombination of photo-generated charges. It is decided that for the codoped TiO2, great visible light absorption is produced by the formation of impurity energy states near both the band edges which also act as the trapping sites for both the photo-generated charges to diminish the recombination process.