Influence of novel Cd – Ni co-substitution on structural, magnetic, optical and photocatalytic properties of BiFeO3 nanoparticles

Abstract The influence of novel Cd-Ni co-substituted BiFeO3 (BFO) on structural, magnetic, optical and photocatalytic properties of nanoparticles were studied. Samples were prepared using tartaric acid modified sol-gel technique. Doping-induced structural distortion from rhombohedral to orthorhombic phase was confirmed by XRD and Raman results. The crystallite size decreases from 16.49 to 11.23 nm with increasing the dopant concentration. Morphological studies using HR-SEM revealed that the average particle size decreased significantly from 91.90 to 53.52 nm. EDX studies were used to validate the sample elemental analysis. Furthermore, the effective co-substitution of Cd-Ni into the bismuth ferrite lattice improved the saturation magnetization from 0.096 emu/g to 2.420 emu/g. The XPS confirmed the dominance of the Fe3+ oxidation state. The optical bandgap of BFO nanoparticles could be tuned by Cd-Ni co-doping from 2.06 eV to 1.75 eV. Also, Bi1-xCdxFe1-xNixO3 (BCFNO-6) sample demonstrated the best Methylene blue (MB) and Rhodamine B (RhB) degradation activity under UV-visible irradiation.