Cost-Effective and Highly Efficient Manganese-Doped MoS2 Nanosheets as Visible-Light-Driven Photocatalysts for Wastewater Treatment

One of the main objectives in wastewater treatment and sustainable energy production is to find photocatalysts that are favorably efficient and cost-effective. Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are promising photocatalytic materials; out of all, MoS2 is extensively studied as a cocatalyst in the TMD library due to its exceptional photocatalytic activity for the degradation of organic dyes due to its distinctive morphology, adequate optical absorption, and rich active sites. However, sulfur ions on the active edges facilitate the catalytic activity of MoS2. On the basal planes, sulfur ions are catalytically inactive. Injecting metal atoms into the MoS2 lattice is a handy approach for triggering the surface of the basal planes and enriching catalytically active sites. Effective band gap engineering, sulfur edges, and improved optical absorption of Mn-doped MoS2 nanostructures are promising for improving their charge separation and photostimulated dye degradation activity. The percentage of dye degradation of MB under visible-light irradiations was found to be 89.87 and 100% for pristine and 20% Mn-doped MoS2 in 150 and 90 min, respectively. However, the degradation of MB dye was increased when the doping concentration in MoS2 increased from 5 to 20%. The kinetic study showed that the first-order kinetic model described the photodegradation mechanism well. After four cycles, the 20% Mn-doped MoS2 catalysts maintained comparable catalytic efficacy, indicating its excellent stability. The results demonstrated that the Mn-doped MoS2 nanostructures exhibit exceptional visible-light-driven photocatalytic activity and could perform well as a catalyst for industrial wastewater treatment.