Mineralization of toxic industrial dyes by gallic acid mediated synthesized photocatalyst SnO2 nanoparticles

This is the first report on gallic acid mediated synthesis of tetragonal rutile tin oxide (SnO2) nanoparticles (NPs) and their photocatalytic activity towards organic dye methylene blue (MB), sunset yellow (SSY) and carmoisine A (CA) under 254 nm UVC irradiations. The crystal structure and crystallite size of SnO2 NPs was confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies. The SnO2 NPs mean diameter of 9 nm was obtained by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis. The photoluminescence and absorption studies were carried out by using fluorescence and UV-Vis spectrophotometers. Its band gap was found to be 3.1 eV. The photocatalytic studies have explored the potential of SnO2 NPs towards mineralization of three dyes, which was confirmed by using UV-Vis spectrophotometer and total organic carbon (TOC) analyzer. Our results show that all three dyes were degraded 100% within 50 min under UVC irradiation which suggest its promising capacity in alleviating environmentally pollutant dyes. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.