Copper (II) complex immobilized on CuFe2O4-chitosan functionalized metformin for pollutants remediation

Abstract

Improved wastewater treatment is essential to ensure the health of humans and ecosystems. Wastewater treatment significantly reduces the risk of disease by removing harmful substances from effluent. This work reports the synthesis of a green and efficient heterogeneous magnetic catalyst, based on chitosan as a natural support. For this purpose, we functionalized magnetic chitosan (CuFe2O4-Ch) with metformin through 3-chloropropyltrimethoxysilane (TMOS) following decoration of this with Cu(II) (CuFe2O4-Ch-Mtn-Cu(II)). We characterized CuFe2O4-Ch-Mtn-Cu(II) by FTIR, XRD, SEM, TEM, VSM, TGA/DTG, BET, EDS, and elemental mapping. The synthesized catalyst was applied for room temperature reduction of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP), methylene blue (MB), and rhodamine B (RhB), in the presence of NaBH4. The reaction times for reduction of the MB, RhB, and 4-NP in the presence the CuFe2O4-Ch-Mtn-Cu(II) (3 mg in tha case of MB and 4-NP and 5 mg in the case of RhB) are 100 s, 11, and 9 min respectively. The reaction kinetics for the reduction of 4-NP and RhB were investigated and the obtained rate constant, k4-NP and kRhB were 0.919 and 0.563 min−1 respectively. The synthesized CuFe2O4-Ch-Mtn-Cu(II) can be recycled and reused 3 times without significant loss of performance.