Facile Synthesis and Characterizations of Mixed Metal Oxide Nanoparticles for the Efficient Photocatalytic Degradation of Rhodamine B and Congo Red Dyes

Photocatalytic degradation has been suggested to be a cheap and efficient way to dispose of organic pollutants, such as dyes. Therefore, our research team strives to produce nanophotocatalysts in a simple and inexpensive way. In this work, the Pechini sol-gel technique was employed for the facile synthesis of MnZnFeO/FeO and FeMnCoO/FeO as mixed metal oxide nanoparticles for the efficient photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B and Congo Red dyes. XRD, FT-IR, a N adsorption/desorption analyzer, EDS, FE-SEM, and an UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectrophotometer were used to characterize the produced samples. The XRD patterns revealed that the average crystallite size of the FeMnCoO/FeO and MnZnFeO/FeO samples is 90.25 and 80.62 nm, respectively. The FE-SEM images revealed that the FeMnCoO/FeO sample consists of cubic and irregular shapes with an average diameter of 1.71 µm. Additionally, the MnZnFeO/FeO sample consists of spherical shapes with an average diameter of 0.26 µm. The energy gaps of the FeMnCoO/FeO and MnZnFeO/FeO samples are 3.50 and 4.3 eV and 3.52 and 4.20 eV, respectively. In the presence of hydrogen peroxide, the complete degradation of 100 mL of 20 mg/L of Rhodamine B and Congo Red dyes occurred at pH = 8 and 3, respectively, within 50 min, using 0.1 g of the synthesized samples.