Use of Vegetable Waste Extracts for Controlling Microstructure of CuO Nanoparticles: Green Synthesis, Characterization, and Photocatalytic Applications

Hameed Ullah,Muhammad Irfan,Zia Ullah,Aliya Fazal

doi:10.1155/2017/2721798

Hameed Ullah, Muhammad Irfan + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/2721798

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Abstract

Chemical syntheses involve either hazardous reactants or byproducts which adversely affect the environment. It is, therefore, desirable to develop synthesis processes which either do not involve hazardous reactants or consume all the reactants giving no byproducts. We have synthesized CuO nanoparticles (NPs) adhering to some of the principles of green chemistry. The CuO NPs have been synthesized exploiting extracts of vegetable wastes, that is, Cauliflower waste and Potatoes and Peas peels. The extracts were aimed to work as capping agents to get control over the microstructure and morphology of the resulting CuO NPs. The green synthesized CuO NPs were characterized to explore the microstructure, morphology, optical bandgaps, and photocatalytic performances. XRD revealed that the CuO NPs of all the samples crystallized in a single crystal system, that is, monoclinic. However, the morphologies and the optical bandgaps energies varied as a function of the extract of vegetable waste. Similarly, the CuO NPs obtained through different extracts have shown different photocatalytic activities. The CuO NPs produced with extract of Cauliflower have shown high degradation of MB (96.28%) compared to obtained with Potatoes peels (87.37%) and Peas peels (79.11%).

Highlights

Cupric oxide (CuO) is one of the very attractive semiconducting materials having indirect narrow bandgap of 1.2 eV [1]
Following the principles of green chemistry, here we report upon the construction of CuO NPs by using extracts of different vegetables (Cauliflowers, Potatoes and Peas peels) wastes, and exploration of their microstructure, morphology, and optical properties
There is no difference in the diffractograms of the three samples indicating that the CuO NPs are obtained in a single phase irrespective of the vegetable extract used

Summary

Introduction

Cupric oxide (CuO) is one of the very attractive semiconducting materials having indirect narrow bandgap of 1.2 eV [1]. The efficiency of CuO materials has been improved by nanostructuring their particle size. For this purpose different methods have been adopted and/or developed, which helped in getting CuO materials in diverse morphologies ([9] and references therein). Some of these classical methods are sol-gel, coprecipitation, electrochemical, solvothermal/hydrothermal, sonochemical, solid state synthesis, and microwave irradiation [9,10,11,12,13,14]. Synthesis of CuO by one of these methods poses serious threats to the environment

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