Hydrothermal Synthesis of Carbon and Sulfur Mono-Doped Sodium Tantalates

TL;DR

This study presents a simple hydrothermal method to synthesize and characterize carbon and sulfur doped sodium tantalates, demonstrating enhanced photocatalytic activity of sulfur-doped variants in dye degradation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel single-step hydrothermal synthesis process for doped sodium tantalates with detailed characterization and improved photocatalytic performance.

Findings

Sulfur doping reduces band gap to 3.52 eV.

Sulfur-doped sodium tantalate shows higher photocatalytic activity.

Doped and undoped sodium tantalates synthesized at different temperatures.

Abstract

A set of experiments was conducted to synthesize doped and undoped sodium tantalates with carbon and sulfur in energy efficient single-step hydrothermal process. Undoped sodium tantalate nanocubes were synthesized at 140$^\circ$C and doped one at 180$^\circ$C for 12 hours in rich alkaline atmosphere. The sizes of undoped, carbon-doped, and sulfur-doped sodium tantalate nanocubes were 38 nm, 45 nm, and 40 nm, respectively. The morphological, elemental, compositional, structural, thermal, and photophysical properties of as-synthesized doped and undoped sodium tantalate (NaTaO$_3$) were characterized using scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive x-ray spectroscope (EDS), Raman spectroscopy, X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer (FTIR), and UV-vis spectrophotometer. The sulfur doped NaTaO$_3$ shows a higher photocatalytic activity in degradation of methylene blue than carbon doped and the undoped NaTaO$_3$. The band gaps of undoped NaTaO$_3$, carbon doped c-NaTaO$_3$, and sulfur doped s-NaTaO$_3$ were calculated to be 3.94 eV, 3.8 eV, and 3.52 eV, respectively using Tauc plot.