Synthesis of Titania Doped Copper Ferrite Photocatalyst and Its Photoactivity towards Methylene Blue Degradation under Visible Light Irradiation

This paper reports the photocatalytic decomposition of methylene blue (MB) over titania doped copper ferrite, CuFe2O4/TiO2 with 50 wt% loading, synthesized via sol-gel method. The synthesized photocatalyst was characterized by X-ray diffraction, UV-vis diffuse reflectance, and photoluminescence, Mott-Schottky (MS) analysis and linear sweep voltammetry (LSV). The catalyst loadings were varied from 0.25 – 1.0 g/L and the optimum catalyst loading found to be 0.5 g/L. At the optimum loading, the conversion achieved was 83.7%. The other loadings produced slightly lower conversions at 82.7%, 80.6% and 80.0%, corresponding to 0.25, 1 and 0.75 g/L after 3 hours of irradiation. The study on the effect of initial concentration indicated that 20 ppm as the optimum concentration, tested with 0.5 g/L catalyst loading. The spent catalyst was used for the recyclability test and demonstrated a high longevity with a degradation efficiency less than 6 % for each time interval. The novelty of this study lies on the new application of photocatalytic material, CuFe2O4/TiO2 on thiazine dye that shows remarkable activity and reusability performance under visible light irradiation.