Facile synthesis of doped ZnO-CdO nanoblocks as solid-phase adsorbent and efficient solar photo-catalyst applications

In this report, the doped ZnO-CdO nanoblocks (NBs) have been synthesized by facile wet-chemical technique at low-temperature and characterized by UV–vis, FT-IR, XRD, FESEM, XPS, XEDS, etc. The NBs were applied for the selective detection of Fe(III) ions and photo-catalytic degradation using Brilliant cresol blue (BCB). The analytical efficiency of NBs phase was also investigated for a selective detection of Fe(III) by ICP-OES. NBs were found to be the most selective toward Fe(III), where adsorption process was mainly monolayer on a homogeneous adsorbent surface. In photo-catalysis, almost 52.3% degradation with BCB dye was observed under solar sources with NBs.