Abstract
Water soluble organic molecular pollution endangers human life and health. It becomes necessary to develop highly stable noble metal nanoparticles without aggregation in solution to improve their catalytic performance in treating pollution. Polyethyleneimine (PEI)-based stable micelles have the potential to stabilize noble metal nanoparticles due to the positive charge of PEI. In this study, we synthesized the amphiphilic PEI-oleic acid molecule by acylation reaction. Amphiphilic PEI-oleic acid assembled into stable PEI-oleic acid micelles with a hydrodynamic diameter of about 196 nm and a zeta potential of about 34 mV. The PEI-oleic acid micelles-stabilized palladium nanoparticles (PO-PdNPsn) were prepared by the reduction of sodium tetrachloropalladate using NaBH4 and the palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) were anchored in the hydrophilic layer of the micelles. The prepared PO-PdNPsn had a small size for PdNPs and good stability in solution. Noteworthily, PO-PdNPs150 had the highest catalytic activity in reducing 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) (Knor = 18.53 s−1mM−1) and oxidizing morin (Knor = 143.57 s−1M−1) in aqueous solution than other previous catalysts. The enhanced property was attributed to the improving the stability of PdNPs by PEI-oleic acid micelles. The method described in this report has great potential to prepare many kinds of stable noble metal nanoparticles for treating aqueous pollution.
Highlights
The quality of water is highly related with our health
The PEI-oleic acid amphiphilic molecules self-assembled in water to form micelles, and the hydrophilic PEI segment acted as a shell layer of the micelles
The critical micelle concentration (CMC) of the PEI-oleic acid micelles was [N]= 0.12 mg/mL based on the fluorescence method using pyrene
Summary
The quality of water is highly related with our health. Many countries have strictly controlled the emissions of various organic pollutants in water [1]. 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) is highly toxic, but its reduced product 4-aminophenol (4-AP) is relatively low in toxicity and is a pharmaceutical intermediate. The catalytic reduction of 4-NP and similar phenol compounds is carried out on catalysts treated with NaBH4. Morin has been used as a model matrix for the study of catalytic bleaching processes in laundry detergents [2,3]. Morin can be degraded by using nanoparticles with H2 O2. These nanoparticles play an important role for the catalytic generation of reactive oxygen species from decomposition of H2 O2
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