Photodegrading rhodamine B dye with cobalt ferrite-graphitic carbon nitride (CoFeO/g-CN) composite.

The present research utilizes a sol-gel approach to create a CoFeO/g-CN nanocomposite (NC) and explored several analytical methods to evaluate physical, chemical and optical based characteristics via XRD, FTIR, UV-vis, SEM/EDS and XPS for the prepared pure CoFeO, g-CN, and CoFeO/g-CN NC. The XRD results show that the prepared g-CN, CoFeO, exhibits hexagonal and cubic phases respectively, whereas the g-CN/CoFeO NC exhibit mixing of two phases. The energy band gaps for pure g-CN, CoFeO and g-CN/CoFeO NC values are viz., 2.75, 1.3, and 2.4 eV. As photocatalysts, synthesized materials were utilized for the decomposition of Rhodamine-B (RhB) dye. Finally, the CoFeO/g-CN NC showed good performance of photocatalysis for RhB dye disintegration under the stimulus of visible light. According to the induced visible light, the rate at which the photocatalytic degradation occurs for the CoFeO/g-CN NC was found to be 57% in 120 min and this is greater when compared with pure catalysts like CoFeO (28%) and g-CN (10%). These outcomes suggest that the prepared NC have efficiently worked during the photocatalytic process compared with its pure materials.