Sol-Gel Assisted Isotropic Morphological Progression in Nanostructured MoO3 and Allied Investigations on Photocatalytic Dye-Degradation

We report tunable-morphology oriented facile yet scalable route to synthesize 1D (nanorod) and 2D (nanobelt) MoO3 nanostructures at gram scale using conventional as well as sonochemistry assisted sol-gel technique. The structural, morphological and optical properties of the samples can be befittingly altered by varying the synthesis protocol. The resultant orthorhombic MoO3 nanomorphs demonstrated efficient and expeditious photocatalytic degradation of the pollutant dye, Methylene Blue (MB). We have observed that appreciable photocatalytic MB dye-degradation can be accomplished within 30 minutes with high rate constants of 0.0786 min(-1) and 0.233 min(-)1 for rod and belt-like MoO3-nanostructures, respectively. The pilot results indicate that the resultant MoO3 nanomorphs can be potentially used as solar light driven industrial photocatalyst material with their intrinsic photostability.