A facile synthesis of CuAg nanoparticles on highly porous ZnO/carbon black-cellulose acetate sheets for nitroarene and azo dyes reduction/degradation

A facile and highly porous heterostructure nanocomposite was designed for the support of zero-valent metal nanoparticles. This nanocomposite comprising of ZnO/carbon black (ZnO/CB) embedded in cellulose acetate polymer (CA), named as ZCA sheet, supported the metallic Cu, Ag and bimetallic CuAg nanoparticles (NPs). The ZnO/CB was incorporated to CA polymer host molecule in 3, 4 and 5 wt% and are designated as ZCA-3, ZCA-4 and ZCA-5. The catalytic tunability was evaluated for CuAg/ZCA-5 by adjusting the concentration of Cu and Ag ions in different molar ratio. Therefore, the CuAg/ZCA-5 was further selected for the removal of eight model pollutants comprising of o-nitrophenol (ONP), m-nitrophenol (MNP), p-nitrophenol (PNP), 2,6-dinitrophenol (DNP), methyl orange (MO), congo red (CR), methylene blue (MB) and rhodamine B (RB). The Kapp value for PNP was 1.9 × 10−1 min−1 and 9.0 × 10−2 min−1 for MO. Among the various nitrophenols, the rate of reaction with CuAg/ZCA-5 followed the ordered as PNP ˃ ONP ˃ MNP ˃ DNP, while methyl orange (MO) is degraded faster as compared to other dyes. The morphology, shape, elemental analysis, functional groups and peak crystallinity were scrutinized through FESEM, EDS, ATR-FTIR and XRD respectively.