UV-Assisted Photocatalytic Synthesis of ZnO-Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanocomposites with Enhanced Photocatalytic Performance in Degradation of Methylene Blue

The requisite to obtain reduced graphene oxide as an individual sheet and to maintain it in the reduced form introduces a new way of manipulative nanocomposite systems (e.g., semiconductor or metal nanoparticle and graphene composite). Herein, we developed a simple suitable UV-.assisted photocatalytic reduction method to prepare the most viable nanocomposite ZnO/RGO. Graphene oxide undergoes reduction reaction in ethanol- water system as it accepts electrons from UV irradiated semiconductor (ZnO), and subsequently characterized using different standard techniques. The presence of graphene in the composites were confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman, FTIR, SEM, TEM, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis. The highly efficient ZnO/RGO nanocomposite exhibited enhanced photocatalytic degradation performance for the degradation of methylene blue, with a maximum removal rate of (∼80%) as compared with pure ZnO nanoparticles (∼68%). This effective increase in degradation were caused by the prevention of electron–hole pair recombination in ZnO with the introduction of RGO. These findings suggest that the synthesized ZnO/RGO nanocomposite via photocatalytic approach not only offers UV-assisted reduction technique, but also open up a new way to obtain photoactive graphene-semiconductors, which could be effectively used in various application.