Photodegradation of Organic Pollutants using Fe-doped ZnO

Fe-doped ZnO mediated by visible light having composition as Zn1-xFexO (x=0.0, 0.05) have been synthesized via sol-gel auto-combustion technique. The thermal and optical properties have been investigated systematically using thrmogravimetric analysis and UV/vis-spectrophotometer, respectively. The doping of Fe3+ at Zn-site in ZnO helped to reduce its band-gap energy, attributed to the creation of an extra level near band edges. The synthesized materials exhibited enhanced photocatalytic activity in the degradation of methylene blue under visible-light irradiation. Pseudo-first-order rate law has also been applied to understand the reaction kinetics of methylene blue when visible-light is induced.