Facile microwave-assisted synthesis of titanium dioxide decorated graphene nanocomposite for photodegradation of organic dyes

An efficient and facile method was adopted to prepare TiO2-graphene (TG) nanocomposites with TiO2 nanoparticles uniformly distributed on graphene. By adjusting the amount of TiO2 precursor, both high and low dense TiO2 nanoparticles on graphene were effectively attained via electrostatic attraction between graphene oxide sheets and TiO2 nanoparticles. The prepared nanocomposites were characterized by various characterization techniques. The TG nanocomposite showed an excellent activity for the photodegradation of the organic dyes such as methylene blue (MB) and rose bengal (RB) under ultra violet (UV) light irradiation. The TG nanocomposite of TG 2.5 showed better photocatalytic performance than bare TiO2 nanoparticles and other composites. The enhanced activity of the composite material is attributed to the reduction in charge recombination and interaction of organic dyes with graphene. The decrease in charge recombination was evidenced from the photoluminescence (PL) spectra. The observed results suggest that the synthesized TG composites have a potential application to treat the industrial effluents, which contain organic dyes.