Al-doped Nano-ZnO Nanowhiskers And Its Photo-degradation Of Methylene Blue

Heterogeneous photocatalytic oxidation by semiconductor catalyst is one of a few advanced oxidation processes. Due to high oxidation potential for the species such as hydroxyl radials (·OH) generated from irradiated catalyst, recalxitrant and toxic pollutants can be efficiently decompoded to H2O and CO2, Zinc dioxide(ZnO) is one of the most promising photocatalysts because of its high photocatalytic activity, high chemical stability, low cost and nontoxi -city. However, the application of ZnO only limit to UV(wavelength<376nm) photocatalysis. It is of great significance to endow ZnO photocatalyst with a visible-light response. Thus, the solar energy can be utilized as the light source in photocatalytic reaction. Since last decade ZnO has been endowed with visible-ligth response by doping with some transition mental ions or mental oxide. Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages for ZnO doping with mental ions, including thermal instability and easiness from carrier charge recombination center. So, in order to synthesize high efficient ZnO semiconductor catalyst, a series of synthesization, characterization reaserch work of nano-sized ZnO photocatalyst were performed.In this paper, nano-sized ZnO materials were synthesized by thermal physical method, firstly. Then, thermal physical method and photochemistry were utilized to synthesize nano-sized Al/ZnO material. All most of these materials were tetrapod-ZnO nanowhiskers. And ZnO nanowhiskers and its Al-doped ones were analysized by XRD and TEM. Al ions were doped into crystal by thermal physical method, but for photoreduction method they deposited on the surface of the nanowhiskers. Al-doped ZnO has effective improvement on photocatalytic degradation for methylene blue (MB). Especially, when Al ions were in the crystal of ZnO, the nanomaterials have best photocatallytic properties with decoloration rate and absorbance.