Invited feature articleSunlight-assisted photocatalytic degradation of textile effluent and Rhodamine B by using iodine doped TiO2 nanoparticles

•I@TiO2 nanoparticles were synthesized by the simple sol-gel method at room temperature.•I@TiO2 nanoparticles showed red shift in visible light absorption, increased surface hydroxylation with increasing iodine content.•Efficient photodegradation of textile effluent and Rhodamine B using I@TiO2 under sunlight irradiation directly.

Iodine-doped TiO2 nanoparticles (I@TiO2 NPs), in different mol percentage (mol%) of iodine with anatase phase only, have been prepared by using simple sol-gel method. Samples were characterized by various physico-chemical techniques. Physico-chemical characterization revealed that crystallite size, surface hydroxylation, and tuning of optical band gap towards visible region of composites increases with increase in dopant concentration upto 7.0 mol% in TiO2 host lattice. Thereafter, the samples were used to photocatalytic degradation of textile effluent (TE) as well as Rhodamine B (RhB) under sunlight irradiation directly. The progress of photodegradation reaction was monitored by UV-visible spectroscopy. The chemical oxygen demand (COD) of TE samples was evaluated before and after photocatalytic studies. During photocatalytic reaction, the effect of pH and amount of catalyst on the rate of degradation reaction was also studied. It is clearly shown that I@TiO2 particles result in the enhancement of the degradation ability of RhB as well as TE in sunlight.

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