Enhanced simultaneous degradation of simulated dyes using ZnO/GCN heterojunction photocatalyst

The scarcity of water leads to research nowadays to focus on techniques for treating wastewater. Photocatalysis emerged as a technique of interest due to its nature of friendliness. It utilizes light and catalyst to degrade the pollutants. One of the popular catalysts to be used is zinc oxide (ZnO), but its usage is limited due to the high recombination rate of electron-hole pair. Herein, in this study, ZnO is modified with graphitic carbon nitride (GCN), and the GCN loading amount was varied to study the impact on photocatalytic degradation of mixed dye solution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that reports on the degradation of mixed dye solution using modified ZnO with GCN. Structural analysis showed that GCN is present in the composites which proves the success of the modification. Photocatalytic activity revealed that the composite with 5 wt% loading of GCN showed the best activity at a catalyst dosage of 1 g/L with degradation rates of 0.0285, 0.0365, 0.0869, and 0.1758 min^-1 for methyl red, methyl orange, rhodamine B, and methylene blue dyes, respectively. This observation is expected due to the formation of heterojunction between ZnO and GCN which creates a synergistic effect and thus led to an improvement in the photocatalytic activity. Based on these results, ZnO modified with GCN has a good potential to be used in the treatment of textile wastewater which consists of various dye mixtures.