Diode characteristics, piezo-photocatalytic antibiotic degradation and hydrogen production of Ce doped ZnO nanostructures.

Piezo-photocatalysis of ZnO nanostructures had recently well attracted due to their exceptional potential in degrading the antibiotics and scalable hydrogen production. Here, we have synthesized the Ce doped ZnO nanospheres in a facile wet chemical strategy. Dopant ions induced morphological evolution and optical bandgap tuning had observed in our experiment. Optical absorbance spectrum had confirmed the bandgap shortening occurs with Ce doped ZnO specimens. The bandgap gap value had reduced to 2.82 eV from 3.05eV confirming the visible light responsivity of ZnO nano specimens. Obtained ZnCeO nanospheres were utilized to fabricate the p-Si/n- ZnCeO heterojunction diodes as well studied the improved electrical conductivity for the Ce specimen-based diodes. Besides, ideality factor and barrier height values of the heterojunction diodes ZnO/p-Si, ZnCeO/p-Si, ZnCeO/p-Si, and ZnCeO/p-Si are 15.97 & 0.43 eV, 15.47 & 0.44 eV, 8.02 & 0.46 eV and 5.21 & 0.47 eV, respectively. Direct sunlight assisted piezo-photocatalytic tetracycline (TC) degradation efficiency of ZnO, ZnCeO, ZnCeO, and ZnCeO nanostructures respectively are 64%, 69%, 74% and 82%. We have produced the hydrogen quantity of 1234 μ mol h, 1490 μ mol h, 1750 μ mol h and 1980 μ mol h with 0%, 1%, 3% and 5% Ce doped ZnO specimens under the direct sunlight assisted piezo-photocatalytic H production from HS splitting.