Studies on Photocatalytic Degradation of Acridine Orange and Chloroform Sensing Using As-Grown Antimony oxide Microstructures

Abstract

Flower shaped antimony oxide (Sb₂O₃) microstructures were synthesized in a large quantity via simple solution method using aqueous mixtures of antimony chloride and hexamethylene diamine (HMDA). The morphological characterizations were done by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), which revealed that the synthesized products possess flower-shaped microstructures. The detailed structural characterizations performed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer (FT-IR) and Raman spectrophotometer confirmed that the synthesized microstructures are well-crystalline antimony oxide. The Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) shows that the grown products are composed of Sb and O. Optical properties of the synthesized products were characterized by UV-Visible spectrophotometer which exhibits a well defined peak at ~ 291.0 nm. The photo-catalytic activity of the Sb₂O₃ microstructures was evaluated by degradation of acridine orange (AO), which mineralized almost 63.0% in 150 min. The chemical sensing properties of Sb₂O₃ microstructures was also studied by I-V technique using chloroform as a detecting solvent. The fabricated chloroform sensor demonstrates good sensitivity of 0.1154 µA cm^–2 mM^–1, lower-detection limit (~0.1 mM), large-linear dynamic range (LDR, 0.122 mM to 1.22 M) with linearity (R = 0.7898) in short response time (10.0 sec).