Materials Today: Proceedings 2 (2015) 5485 – 5490 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect 2214-7853 © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the Committee Members of International Conference on Solid State Physics 2013 (ICSSP’13) doi:10.1016/j.matpr.2015.11.074 International Conference on Solid State Physics 2013 (ICSSP’13) Photodegradation of organic pollutants using Fe-doped ZnO Shahid M. Ramay a *, Asif Mahmood a , Shahid Atiq b , Saadat Anwar Siddiqi c , Shahzad Naseem b a Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Science, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia b Centre of Excellence in Solid State Physics, University of the Punjab, Quaid-e-Azam Campus, Lahore-54590, Pakistan c Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Biomedical Materials, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Defence Road, Off Raiwind Road, Lahore, Pakistan Abstract Fe-doped ZnO mediated by visible light having composition as Zn 1-x Fe x O (x=0.0, 0.05) have been synthesized via sol-gel auto-combustion technique. The thermal and optical properties have been investigated systematically using thrmogravimetric analysis and UV/vis-spectrophotometer, respectively. The doping of Fe 3+ at Zn-site in ZnO helped to reduce its band-gap energy, attributed to the creation of an extra level near band edges. The synthesized materials exhibited enhanced photocatalytic activity in the degradation of methylene blue under visible-light irradiation. Pseudo-first-order rate law has also been applied to understand the reaction kinetics of methylene blue when visible- light is induced. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the Committee Members of International Conference on Solid State Physics 2013 (ICSSP’13). Keywords: Fe-doped ZnO; Organic pollutants; Photocatalysts * E-mail address: smramay@yahoo.com © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the Committee Members of International Conference on Solid State Physics 2013 (ICSSP’13)