Cobalt doped antimony oxide nano-particles based chemical sensor and photo-catalyst for environmental pollutants

Cobalt doped antimony oxide nano-particles (NPs) have been synthesized by hydrothermal process and structurally characterized by utilizing X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and Fourier transforms infrared spectrophotometer (FT-IR) which revealed that the synthesized cobalt antimony oxides (CoSb2O6) are well crystalline nano-particles with an average particles size of 26 +/- 10 nm. UV-visible absorption spectra (similar to 286 nm) were used to investigate the optical properties of CoSb2O6. The chemical sensing of CoSb2O6 NPs have been primarily investigated by I-V technique, where dichloromethane is used as a model compound. The analytical performance of dichloromethane chemical sensor exhibits high sensitivity (1.2432 mu A cm(-2) mM(-1)) and a large linear dynamic range (1.0 mu M-0.01 M) in short response time (10 s). The photo catalytic activity of the synthesized CoSb2O6 nano-particles was evaluated by degradation of acridine orange (AO), which degraded 58.37% in 200 min. These results indicate that CoSb2O6 nano-particles can play an excellent research impact in the environmental field. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.