Photo-Fenton degradation of nano-structured La doped CuO nanoparticles synthesized by combustion technique

In the development of nano structured materials, metal oxide nanoparticles are extensively pursued because of their promising applications due to their effective physio-chemical properties. In the midst of these fascinating metal oxides, copper oxide nanoparticles have received substantial acquaintance because of the exclusive electrical, optical, structural and catalytic chattels. The CuO nanoparticles owns supercilious physical and chemical properties which are reliant on the variation of the particle or crystallite size. A cost effective and time saving combustion synthesis was used to synthesize lanthanum doped copper oxide nanoparticles in order to investigate their structural, morphological and optical properties. The as-prepared nanoparticles were characterized by XRD, FT-IR, UV-vis, TEM and Raman spectroscopy. The crystallite size of the nanoparticles was determined by X-ray diffraction technique. By using FTIR, the fingerprint regions of vibrational bands of CuO were interpreted in the range of 300-600 cm−1. The morphology of the agglomerated CuO nanoparticles was obtained from TEM. The UV-spectral analysis reveal the optical property and hence the optical band gap was found using Kubelka-Munk plot and the Raman spectroscopy was taken in the range of 200-1350 cm−1 to determine the microstructural nature of CuO nanoparticles. From the overall results, the effect of dopants on the CuO nanoparticles were studied and the photocatalytic characteristics of the synthesized samples were studied for degradation of Methylene Blue dye which was superintended by UV-vis spectrophotometric studies in the regular interval of time.