Abstract
The drastic change in the industrial sector and the commercialization has led to the exposure of various hazardous molecules in the atmosphere wherein modern catalytic techniques have played a crucial role in the advancement of technologies to overcome this problem. In this work, we have reported an efficient method for the synthetic fabrication of novel N-heterocyclic carbene functionalized boehmite-supported silver nanoparticles (BML@Ag) as a sustainable nanocatalyst for treating water pollutants like 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) and Congo red (CR) dye. Further, to confirm the successful development of the prepared nanocatalyst we have carried out various spectroscopic and microscopic analyses like FT-IR, p-XRD, FE-SEM, EDS, HR-TEM, BET and TGA. The average crystallite size was found to be 6.69 nm. Further, the BML@Ag nanocatalyst was explored for its catalytic efficacy in the reduction of 4-NP and degradation of the organic diazo dye CR using an aqueous solution of NaBH4 as the reducing agent. The reduction of 4-NP was observed to occur in 2.5 min (99.9%), while CR degraded in 5 min (98.8%), with the rate constants of 36.2×10-3 and 13.6×10-3 s-1 respectively. The recyclability study was demonstrated for both 4-NP and CR dye and recyclability was achieved up to 3 cycles with an excellent conversion efficiency. To explore the convenience of the BML@Ag nanocatalyst, the effects of changing parameters such as catalyst loading, pH, and salt concentration were thoroughly investigated. Furthermore, the ability of the BML@Ag nanocatalyst to reduce/degrade the pollutants was demonstrated with spiked tap and lake water samples. The efficiency of BML@Ag nanocatalyst was found to give the best conversion efficiency for the lake water samples of both 4-NP and CR dye with 99.5% and in the tap water the efficiency was noted to be reduced in both cases. The real-time investigation validated the competence of the BML@Ag nanocatalyst to be extended for commercial use.
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