Enhancement of photocatalytic dye degradation efficiency of ZnO/Ag film deposited on flexible stainless steel meshes through g-C3N4 addition

Binary and ternary combined ZnO/Ag and ZnO/Ag/g-C3N4 films were coated onto meshes (SSM) made of stainless steel using a homemade tubular nebulizer spray method. The photocatalytic dye degradation treatment with the presence of the prepared samples under UV-visible irradiation shows that ZnO/Ag/g-C3N4 film acts as a better photocatalytic material than ZnO/Ag. The degradation efficiency of binary catalyst is found to be 91% and 90% for MB and MG dyes, respectively whereas the corresponding values of the ternary catalyst are 99% and 95%, respectively. The reasons for the enhancement in the photocatalytic dye degradation of ternary catalyst are explained with suitable mechanism with the help of various analytical studies such as XRD, PL, FT-IR, SEM, TEM, HRTEM, EDAX, DRS and XPS. DFT calculations have been done for the validation of the experimental results.