Enhanced ultraviolet driven photocatalytic activity of CTS-SnO2-MWCNTs ternary nanohybrid for photodegradation of methylene blue and bacteria in aqueous solutions

Developing low-cost metal-based photocatalyst with great effectiveness for degradation of organic pollutants is still a serious challenge. In the present study, we suggest a novel "suitable bandgap matching and interfacial engineering" strategy through the synthesis of ternary nanohybrid to attain an effective photocatalytic reaction. The construction synthesized by embedded SnO2 NPs on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) surface homogeneously, that anchored on chitosan (CTS). The synthesized photocatalysts characterized by FT-IR, XRD, FESEM, EDX, elemental mapping, AFM, TEM, BET and UV–Vis DRS spectroscopy. In comparison with SnO2 and CTS-SnO2, the CTS-SnO2-MWCNTs led to increasing photocatalytic degradation (97.59%) and adsorption activity (84.24%) for aqueous methylene blue (MB) dye contaminant under the irradiation of UV light and in the darkness for 30 min. In addition, a feasible reaction mechanism suggested and the scavenger experiment performed in order to find the active radical species role that is responsible for the dye decoloration. The antibacterial reaction of nanostructures against Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli strains were determined by applying disk diffusion method and showed considerable bactericidal activity against bacteria strains. So, the synthesized ternary nanohybrid could be an effective photocatalyst with antibacterial features. Moreover, the CTS-SnO2-MWCNTs photocatalyst showed great stability even after numerous runs. This research presents promising results for developing an efficient, stable, noble metal-free and UV light-driven photocatalyst.