Researchers Use Various Zinc Oxide Nanostructures to Boost Efficiency of Water Purification Process

An Iranian researcher in association with Swedish scientists studied the use of various nanostructures of zinc oxide in the improvement of the removal of industrial pollutants from water and the differences in their efficiencies.

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2014-07-14

Water pollution is one of the most important problems in today's societies. Many researchers are currently carrying out studies and researches to settle this problem. The use of nanostructures for the elimination of various types of pollutants is one of the approaches that have attracted the attention of many researchers. In this research, the aim was to study and introduce various zinc oxide nanostructures with high photocatalytic efficiency in the removal of pollutants, specially Red Congo organic dye. This dye is poisonous but it is used by the researchers because it changes color as pH value varies from alkali to acidic media.

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Various zinc oxide structures, including nanorod, nanosheet and nanoleaf have been used in the removal of the pollutant. Based on the results, nanorods have the highest efficiency among all other structures. The amount of the elimination of Red Congo by using nanorods was 67% while it was 48% and 12% for nanoleaves and nanosheets, respectively.

All nanostructures used in this research were produced through hydrothermal method at low temperature. This method does not require complicated equipment and it has low cost.

This research is a part of a bigger project being carried out under the supervision of Prof. Magnus Wislander from Linkoping University in Sweden. In fact, various properties of metallic oxide nanostructures have been studied in applications such as biosensors and photocatalytic processes.

Source: Nanotechnology Now

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