Environmental Friendly Approach for Facile Synthesis of Graphene-Like Nanosheets for Photocatalytic Activity

Here, an environmentally friendly bottom-up method introduced as an easy, inexpensive, and affordable method for synthesize of graphene-like nanostructures. Results indicated that the presence of FeCl3 and oxalic acid could improve the quality of the final product impressively. FeCl3 plays key role for the generation of the high-quality graphene because it acts as both template and catalyst for the formation of graphene. The products were characterized by XRD, FT-IR, TGA, SEM, Raman and TEM analyses. The photocatalytic degradation ability of (graphene/iron oxide/titanium dioxide) Gr/Fe3O4/TiO2 nanocomposite for the removal of rhodamine B dyes from wastewater was reported. The obtained adsorbent with porous structure not only exhibited fast adsorption rate, superior adsorption capacity, but also presented convenient magnetic separation characteristic. Synthesized magnetic nanostructures can be separated from reaction mixtures by an external magnet. As a result of its attractive features such as; simple preparation, superior catalytic activity and magnetic recyclability the synthesized nanocomposite obtained in this work provides a new insight to enhance the photocatalytic efficiency.