Combination of Cu2O semiconductor with reduced graphene oxide nanocomposites for boosting photocatalytic performance in degradation of organic pollutant

This study presents efficient photocatalytic degradation of tetracycline (TC) via impregnation of Cu2O nanoparticles on TiO2 nanosheets/reduced graphene oxide nanocomposites. Different techniques such as PXRD, UV-Vis DRS, TEM, FESEM/EDX, Raman spectroscopy and N-2 physisorption were employed to identify synthesized samples. The results of PXRD and Raman analyses indicated that TNs had a pure anatase phase, and graphene oxide was changed to reduced graphene oxide during the hydrothermal procedure. In addition, UV-Vis DRS results proved that modification of TNs with rGO and Cu2O facilitated the absorption of visible light. The best performance for the degradation of TC was obtained by the CGT(40) sample, which was 71.91% for visible and 83.1% for UV irradiation. The data obtained from degradation tests were modeled by the artificial neural network (ANN) as an intelligent tool. A three-layer network with 20 hidden neurons provided the best performance.