Visible Light Driven Effective Photodegradation of Alizarin Red S Using Zirconium Doped Metastable Hexagonal MoO 3 Nanorods

This work presents the synthesis of MoO 3 and zirconium doped MoO 3 nanoparticles by hydrothermal method and their characterizations by several analytical techniques. The XRD patterns of all the undoped and doped samples could be indexed to the hexagonal phase with rod shaped morphologies which were obtained from SEM images. The EDX patterns show the respective elemental composition in the samples thus revealing the effective doping of zirconium into the host lattice of MoO 3 without any impurities. The structural features were substantiated by FTIR and Raman spectral studies. The band-gap energies tend to decrease on increasing the dopant concentration. The decrease in PL intensities after doping reveals the lower electron–hole recombination rate which is an important characteristic of photocatalytic studies. The XPS spectra of the NPs were studied to confirm the oxidation state of Zr ions. The doping of zirconium with MoO 3 nanoparticles enhanced the photodegradation of Alizarin red S (ARS) in visible region which were studied by varying certain parameters such as catalytic dosage, dye concentration and so on.