Synthesis of magnetic Fe3O4@ZnO@graphene oxide nanocomposite for photodegradation of organic dye pollutant

In this study graphene oxide (GO) is applied as a substrate for the synthesis of the magnetic ZnO nanocomposite (GO-Fe3O4-ZnO). The prepared samples are characterised using XRD and VSM. The photocatalytic performance of the synthesised samples is evaluated according to the photodegradation of methyl orange (MO) as an organic dye pollutant model. The XRD results show that the prepared nanocomposites contain the modified GO with the cubic structure of Fe3O4 and hexagonal wurtzite structure of ZnO nanoparticles. Base on the VSM results, it can be confirmed that the synthesised Fe3O4-ZnO, GO-Fe3O4 and GO-Fe3O4-ZnO have superparamagnetic properties. Meanwhile, the saturation magnetisation (Ms) of GO-Fe3O4 (45.788 emu/g) is higher than that of Fe3O4-ZnO and GO-Fe3O4-ZnO. The UV-vis spectrophotometer results reveal that all of the prepared samples can adsorb the UV irradiation and decompose the MO. The removal efficiency of MO using GO-Fe3O4-ZnO at each concentration and irradiation time is more than that of Fe3O4-ZnO. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) results confirm that main factors (weight fraction and irradiation time) and their interactions have a significant effect on the removal efficiency of MO.