Lanthanum oxide nanoparticles immobilized reduced graphene oxide polymer brush nanohybrid for environmental vitiation of organic dyes

Abstract

In the present work, uniformly distributed Lanthanum Oxide nanoparticles on poly (tetrahydrofurfuryl methacrylate) brushes spread over the surface of reduced graphene oxide (La2O3/PTHF/rGO) are synthesized. La2O3/PTHF/rGO is used as catalyst for the degradation of Rhodamine B (RhB), Methyl Orange (MO) and Eosine Y (ESY) dyes. Catalyst has shown excellent catalytic activity as evident by the apparent Rate constant (kapp), which is found to be 26.8, 28.6, and 20.5 (×10−3 s−1), for RhB, MO and ESY respectively, much higher than the reported in literature. The catalyst is recycled for five times without any significant loss in its activity, which makes it suitable for the applications in catalysis and waste water management. Keywords: Dye degradation, Graphene oxide, Lanthanum oxide, Polymer brush, ATRP, Heterogeneous catalysis