Cobalt doped antimony oxide nano-particles based chemical sensor and photo-catalyst for environmental pollutants

Cobalt doped antimony oxide nano-particles (NPs) have been synthesized by hydrothermal process and structurally characterized by utilizing X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and Fourier transforms infrared spectrophotometer (FT-IR) which revealed that the synthesized cobalt antimony oxides (CoSb2O6) are well crystalline nano-particles with an average particles size of 26 ± 10 nm. UV-visible absorption spectra (∼286 nm) were used to investigate the optical properties of CoSb2O6. The chemical sensing of CoSb2O6 NPs have been primarily investigated by I-V technique, where dichloromethane is used as a model compound. The analytical performance of dichloromethane chemical sensor exhibits high sensitivity (1.2432 μA cm−2 mM−1) and a large linear dynamic range (1.0 μM-0.01 M) in short response time (10 s). The photo catalytic activity of the synthesized CoSb2O6 nano-particles was evaluated by degradation of acridine orange (AO), which degraded 58.37% in 200 min. These results indicate that CoSb2O6 nano-particles can play an excellent research impact in the environmental field.

Graphical abstractA dichloromethane chemical sensor using cobalt antimony oxides has been fabricated. This sensor showed high sensitivity and will be a useful candidate for environmental and health monitoring. Also it showed high photo-catalytic activity and can be a good candidate as a photo-catalyst for organic hazardous materials.Download full-size imageHighlights► Reusable chemical sensor. ► Green environmental and eco-friendly chemi-sensor. ► High sensitivity. ► Good candidate for environmental and health monitoring.