Visible light‐active pure and lanthanum‐doped copper oxide nanostructures for photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue dye and hydrogen production

Clean water and renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly important in the current era, as well a future challenge, one of potential solutions is photocatalysis. In study, simple one-step hydrothermal technique employed to fabricate pure La-doped CuO (0%, 1%, 3%, 5%, 7%) photocatalysts. The influence varying La concentration on structure, morphology, optical properties determined by scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), ultraviolet (UV)–visible spectroscopy, photoluminescence. SEM showed that synthesized nanostructures irregularly spherical transform into needle-like increasing concentration. XRD revealed monoclinic phase with crystallite size 15–23 nm. UV–visible spectrum exhibited decrease band gap from UV visible light. composition purity evaluated via energy-dispersive which without any impurity traces. were used photocatalyst against methylene blue dye examine their photocatalytic activity. CuO-3La excellent performance degradation hydrogen production 95.3 μmol h−1 g−1 more than 97% cyclic stability. Therefore, candidates for splitting evolution.