Abstract
The present work addresses a facile synthesis of Indium doped zinc oxide (IZO) cellulose acetate nanocomposite membrane. The membrane was prepared by casting method. Various weights of In:ZnO nanoparticles were added to solution formed by dissolution of cellulose acetate granules in acetone. The harvested membrane, after acetone evaporation, was characterized by various techniques including X ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X ray and elemental mapping, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The results show that the In:ZnO nanoparticles are well embedded in the cellulose acetate host matrix. The elemental mapping reveals that the nanoparticles are uniformly distributed. The optical characterization reveals the reduction of the transmittance in the UV (A and B range) of the CA/IZO composite with increasing the weight of the added IZO powder. This reduction was attributed to ZnO UV absorption. No noticeable peak assigned to ZnO bond are observed. However, IR peaks are shifted towards the higher wavenumber due to the change of the bonds environment with including IZO in the CA matrix. The antibacterial action of the synthetized nanocomposite membranes was tested against Escherichia coli (E. coli). Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus). The assay results have shown that the membrane has no activity against (E. coli). In contrary, the synthetized membrane exhibits an interesting antibacterial activity against S. aureus. The inhibition region varies from 6 to 15 mm with increasing the weight ratio of filler. A zone of inhibition (ZOI) of 18 mm was observed for the membrane prepared with 30% wt. of In:ZnO. We noticed that the ZOI radius increases with the added weight of IZO. Due the settling down of the nanoparticles only one face of the membrane exhibits an antibacterial activity.