Plasmonic Nanoparticles Decorated Graphene Sheets for Detection of Water Pollutants

Abstract

In the 21st century, human health, water safety, and environmental pollution are the main crucial issues all over the world. Many hazardous organic and inorganic pollutants present in the groundwater, surface water systems create havoc in the environment as well as drinking water. Waterborne diseases are dangerous for human health and other animals. Thus development of the simple and user friendly methods of for the easy detection of the water pollutants are necessary for healthy society. Graphene is one of the most promising and wonderful carbon hybrid materials as it possesses many outstanding properties like honeycomb structure, high surface area, unique physical, mechanical and chemical properties, etc. The nanoparticles such as Au, Ag, and Cu possess shape, and size-dependent surface plasmon resonance (SPR) absorption bands thus can be used to construct plasmonic-based sensors. Recently 2D graphene and its composites are widely used as a support to these metal nanoparticles to improve sensitivity and selectivity towards the analytes. These nanocomposites are widely used to detect hazardous environmental pollutants by different techniques like colorimetric, fluorometry, and electrochemical sensing. There are several reports on designing graphene quantum dots/metal nanoparticle based system for sensing application for water pollutants like organic pollutants, gold, silver, mercury, iron, etc. These techniques are very simple and do not require expensive facilities, highly skilled manpower, and easy to operate. This chapter is mostly focussed on the synthesis of monometallic and bimetallic plasmonic nanoparticles decorated graphene/graphene quantum dots system for the detection of water pollutants. The recent development of the detection of water pollutants by colorimetric, fluorometric, and electrochemical detection techniques using plasmonic nanoparticles decorated 2D nanosheet are also briefly discussed in this chapter.