Herein, we prepared a novel photocatalytic ZnO-TiO2 loaded carbon nanofibers composites (ZnO-TiO2-CNFs) via electrospinning technique followed by a hydrothermal process. At first, the electrospun TiO2 NP-embedded carbon nanofibers (TiO2-CNFs) were achieved using electrospinning and a carbonization process. Next, the ZnO particles were grown into the TiO2-CNFs via hydrothermal treatment. The morphology, structure, and chemical compositions were studied using state-of-the-art techniques. The photocatalytic performance of the ZnO-TiO2-CNFs composite was studied using degrading methylene blue (MB) under UV-light irradiation for three successive cycles. It was noticed that the ZnO-TiO2-CNFs nanocomposite showed better MB removal properties than that of other formulations, which might be due to the synergistic effects of carbon nanofibers and utilized metal oxides (ZnO and TiO2). The adsorption characteristic of carbon fibers and matched band potentials of ZnO and TiO2 combinedly help to boost the overall photocatalytic performance of the ZnO-TiO2-CNFs composite. The obtained results from this study indicated that it can be an economical and environmentally friendly photocatalyst.
Recently, as environmentally clean and sustainable energy sources, high-performance electrochemical energy storage devices, such as secondary batteries and supercapacitors have received great attention [1-3]. In particular, supercapacitors have received huge interest due to the high power density, long-term cycle stability, fast charging/discharging process, safety and low maintenance cost [4], and therefore are widely used for different applications such as consumer electronics, portable devices, electric vehicles, memory backup devices and public transportation etc [5][6][7]. In order to fulfill the growing energy density demands for next generation supercapacitors, a dramatic improvement of energy density (E = (CV 2 )/2) of supercapacitors is still one of the great challenges, which can be generally accomplished by increasing the specific capacitance (C) and operation potential window (V) [8,9]. Accordingly, the development of high-performance pseudo-capacitors and hybrid supercapacitors involves compounding the high surface area carbon materials with transition metal oxides and/or conducting polymers [10][11][12][13][14][15]. However, poor electrical conductivity (mostly due to inferior conductivity of transition metal oxides) and serious charge transfer resistance (R CT ) (due to poor interface contact/ adhesion between active materials and current collectors) have been limited to improve the performance of the supercapacitor electrodes in view of energy density, power density, cycle stability, rate capability and charge/
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