Hydrothermal synthesis of spindle structure copper ferrite-graphene oxide nanocomposites for enhanced photocatalytic dye degradation and in-vitro antibacterial activity.

In this study, a one-step hydrothermal approach was used to make pure magnetic copper ferrite (CuFeO) and copper ferrite-graphene oxide (CuFeO-rGO) nanocomposites (NCs) and spinel structure CuFeO with a single phase of tetragonal CuFeO-rGO-NCs was confirmed by the XRD. Then, characterization of CuFeO-rGO-NCs was done using ng Raman spectroscopy, FT-IR, TGA-DTA, EDS, SEM, and TEM. The synthesized NCs was exposed to UV light to evaluate its photocatalytic activity for the degradation of methylene blue (MB) and rhodamine B (RhB) with CuFeO and CuFeO-rGO-NCs, respectively. The catalyst CuFeO-rGO-NCs provided higher degradation of MB (94%) than for RhB (86%) under UV light irradiation compared to CuFeO. Further, the antibacterial activities of CuFeO-NPs and CuFeO-rGO-NCs were tested against Gram-negative and -positive bacterial pathogens such as Vibrio cholera (V. cholera); Escherichia coli (E. coli); Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa); Bacillus subtilis (B. subtilis); Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus); and Staphylococcus epidermidis (S. epidermidis) by well diffusion method. At 100 μg/mL concentrations of CuFeO-rGO-NCs, maximal growth inhibition was shown against E. coli (18 mm) and minimum growth inhibition against S. epidermidis (12 mm). This study suggests that CuFeO-rGO-NCs as a high-efficacy antibacterial material and plays an important role in exhibiting higher sensitivity depending on concentrations. The results encourage that the synthesized CuFeO-rGO-NCs can be used as a promising material for the antibacterial activity and also for dye degradation in the water/wastewater treatment plants.