Improved visible light-assisted photocatalytic degradation of basic violet 16 and basic red 46 dyes from single and binary component systems using SnO2/CuNb2O6 heterostructure nanocomposite

Organic dyes from textile industries, which typically contain a mixture of several dyes have become a serious concern due to their presence in wastewater. Therefore, high performance materials and methods are required to eliminate and analysis them from wastewater. Herein, we fabricated SnO2/CuNb2O6 heterostructure nanocomposite as an efficient visible-light-driven photocatalyst to degrade and mineralize basic violet 16 (BV16) and basic red 46 (BR46) dyes in single or binary solutions. SnO2 nanotube arrays were successfully synthesized using the liquid phase deposition (LPD) process. Following this, SnO2 nanotubes were integrated with CuNb2O6 nanoparticles prepared via the sol–gel method. The first-order derivative spectrophotometric technique was used to solve the overlapped absorption spectra that occur in simultaneous analysis of dyes for the multi-component systems. The photocatalytic experiments demonstrated that SnO2/CuNb2O6 nanocomposite has the highest photocatalytic activity to degrade BV16 and BR46 dyes in both single and binary mixture solutions, compared to the pure SnO2 nanotubes and CuNb2O6 nanoparticles. For the SnO2/CuNb2O6 nanocomposite, 94.6% of BR46 and 95.1% of BV16 were degraded in their binary mixtures, whereas the degradation efficiency of BV16 and BR46 dyes in their respective single solutions were found to be 94.5% and 97.7%, respectively. It was observed that the degradation rate constants of BR46 for all photocatalysts in single dye solution was lower than that of BV16, which can be ascribed to the relatively more complex structure of BR46 rather than BV16. This study exhibited the feasibility of designing and utilizing SnO2/CuNb2O6 nanocomposites as a promising photocatalytic material for the efficient degradation of dye mixtures in the textile industry.