Facile preparation of porous Ga2O3 nano/microbars for highly efficient photocatalytic degradation

As a facile solution of emerging health issues caused by organic and inorganic pollutants in consumable water, low dimensional novel materials are employed for catalytic removal of hazardous contaminants. Gallia has been a well-known candidate in this field. This work demonstrates effective separation of wide range of popular water contaminants of different ionic and chemical identity. Aiming to this, porous bar like α-Gallia nanostructures were synthesized using facile solid state route. Thorough characterization of the samples were performed via XRD, FESEM, EDX and UV-Vis spectrophotometry to investigate its structural, morphological, compositional and optical band gap related features. The samples were found to exhibit wide UV range band gap. After identification of its excitation energy, the sample was subjected to standard photocatalytic performance to degrade hazardous water pollutants like Methylene Blue (MB) and Eosin B (EB). To closely mimic real water contaminants, proportional mixture of the dyes were also degraded using the sample. It was observed that the sample exhibit remarkable degradation efficiency with rate constant as high as 0.47516 min−1 and it also proved to retain degradation efficiency even after multiple cycles.