Modified physical properties of Ni doped ZnO NPs as potential photocatalyst and antibacterial agents

Hazardous organic dyes, present in the effluents of industries, are continuously polluting the environment. Photodegradation of these dyes on catalyst surface under sunlight irradiation is economic, safe and suitable strategy to protect environment. Hence, the synthesis and applications of Zn1-xNixO (x = 0.00, 0.02, 0.04, 0.06) NPs are reported here. Effect of pH and dopant concentration was studied to modify the electrical, magnetic, antibacterial and photocatalytic properties of Ni doped ZnO NPs. The samples were characterized by Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV–Visible spectroscopy (UV–Vis.), Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to determine the morphology, crystallite structure, optical properties, elemental composition and functional group detection, respectively. LCR meter and VSM were used to evaluate the dielectric properties and magnetic properties of Ni doped ZnO NPs, respectively. XRD pattern confirmed the presence of hexagonal wurtzite geometry of ZnO NPs. The structural and morphological analysis showed the increase in crystallinity with little effect on shape of doped NPs by increasing the dopant concentration and slight increase of pH. It was observed that the Ni doped ZnO NPs possess good photocatalytic potential by 94% degradation of 20 ppm solution of methyl orange dye (MO) in just 80 min under sunlight. Moreover, the enhancement in antibacterial potential was also observed with increase in dopant concentration and decrease in crystallite size of doped ZnO NPs. Smaller size NPs were found more effective against gram negative bacterial strains.