One-Pot Fabrication of RGO-Ag3 VO4 Nanocomposites by in situ Photoreduction using Different Sacrificial Agents: High Selectivity Toward Catechol Synthesis and Photodegradation Ability.

Weak photon absorption and fast carrier kinetics in graphene restrict its applications in photosensitive reactions. Such restrictions/limitations can be overcome by covalent coupling of another photosensitive nanostructure to graphene, forming graphene-semiconductor nanocomposites. Herein, we report one-pot synthesis of RGO-Ag3 VO4 nanocomposites using various sacrificial agents like ethanol, methanol, propanol and ethylene glycol (EG) under visible light illumination. The Raman spectral analysis and (13) C MAS NMR suggest ethanol to be the best sacrificial agent among those studied. Thermal analysis studies, further, confirm the stability of the synthesized nanocomposite with ethanol as sacrificial agent. In view of this, the activity toward dye degradation was focused over the composites prepared via ethanol as sacrificial agent. It was observed and proved that cationic dyes could be degraded quantitatively and swiftly compared to anionic dyes (37.79%) in 1.5 h. This suggests that the surface of the nanocomposites is anionic as partial reduction takes place during synthesis process. In case of mixed dye degradation process, it was noticed that the presence of cationic dye doubles the degradation of anionic dye. The activity of these synthesized nanocomposites is more than five-fold toward the phototransformation of phenol and photodegradation of textile dyes under visible light illumination.

Physicochemical characterization and adsorption behavior of calcined Zn/Al hydrotalcite-like compound (HTlc) towards removal of fluoride from aqueous solution.

A Zn/Al hydrotalcite-like compound (HTlc) was prepared by co-precipitation (at constant pH) method and was characterized by XRD, TG/DTA, FTIR, and BET surface area. The ability of Zn/Al oxide to remove F- from aqueous solution was investigated. All the adsorption experiments were carried out as a function of time, pH, concentration of adsorbate, adsorbent dose, temperature etc. It was found that the maximum adsorption takes place within 4 h at pH 6.0. The percentage of adsorption increases with increase in the adsorbent dose, but decreases with increase in the adsorbate concentration. From the temperature variation it was found that the percentage of adsorption decreases with increase in temperature, which shows that the adsorption process is exothermic in nature. The adsorption data fitted well into the linearly transformed Langmuir equation. Sulfate and phosphate were found to have profound effects on fluoride removal. Thermodynamic parameters such as DeltaG0, DeltaH0, and DeltaS0 were calculated. The negative value of DeltaH0 indicates that the adsorption process is exothermic. The apparent equilibrium constants (Ka) are also calculated and found to decrease with increase in temperature. With 0.01 M NaOH the adsorbed F- could be completely desorbed from Zn/Al oxide in 6 h.