Abstract
Water is a vital ingredient in all life forms and crucial for their survival. Yet, contamination of water by toxic effluents from various sources makes it lethal, posing a threat to the environment and health of living beings. Therefore, an effective and efficient method for the treatment of these effluents is the need of the hour. In continuation to our recent investigations into the application of heterogeneous catalytic systems in treating environmental contaminants, herein we report the design and synthesis of palladium(0) nanoparticles immo-bilized graphitic-carbon nitride (g-C3N4-Si@Pd) as a nanocatalyst in a facile four-step synthesis. The g-C3N4- Si@Pd nanocatalyst was characterized by various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques such as FT-IR, FE-SEM, EDS, ICP-OES, TEM, BET, TGA and p-XRD to confirm its structure and morphology. It was then successfully explored for its catalytic activity in the reduction of various environmental contaminants, such as 4-nitrophenol, chromium(VI), methyl orange and rhodamine B. Being heterogeneous in nature, the nanocatalyst was easily recovered from the reaction mass by simple centrifugation. The g-C3N4-Si@Pd nanocatalyst is economical, facile, requires mild reaction conditions and produce non-toxic byproducts. Also, the g-C3N4-Si@Pd nanocatalyst exhibited high electrocatalytic activity and high electronic conductivity in hydrogen evolution reaction.