Enhanced charge transfer and separation of hierarchical CuO/ZnO composites: The synergistic effect of photocatalysis for the mineralization of organic pollutant in water

Construction of heterojunction photocatalyst with charges separation is essential in photocatalysis for solar energy conversion. In this work, CuO/ZnO nanocomposites were synthesized with different Cu/Zn weight percentage. The morphological transformation from hollow dumbbell to nanosheets was observed with change in Cu/Zn percentage. Moreover, the CuO/ZnO nanocomposite shows good adsorption and photocatalytic decomposition capacity for Methylene Blue (MB). The CuO/ZnO nanocomposites improve the transfer and electron and hole pairs separation. Compared to TiO2, the CuO/ZnO nanocomposite with 5 wt% of Cu shows enhanced activity with MB degradation of 96.57% in 25 min. The enhanced performance of nanocomposite was explained by the p-n junction interface which hinders the electron-hole pair recombination.