Theoretical and experimental study of the photodegradation of methyl orange in the presence of different morphologies of Au-ZnO using Monte Carlo dynamic simulation.

Herein, a simple approach was formed based on synthesizing different morphologies of ZnO and Au-ZnO as photocatalyst. In this study, ZnO and Au-ZnO were synthesized via a co-precipitation method and fully characterized via scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). Three different ratios of Zn:OH (1:2, 1:3, and 1:5) controlled the morphology of samples, which were made into spindle, star, and flower structures, respectively.