Espumas de poliestireno impregnadas com nanopartículas de ouro para a redução do p-nitrofenol

Abstract

There are countless researches related to the treatment of waste water because they contain large amounts of recalcitrant chemicals, such as p-Nitrophenol widely used in the industry in dyeing leather. Because it is a very toxic substance even at low concentrations, its total removal and / or transformation into other less polluting substances becomes an urgent environmental issue. Gold nanoparticles because they have great catalytic potential besides being non-toxic can somehow contribute to the minimization of the environmental effects caused by nitrophenols. Reactions using homogeneous catalysts are not very feasible in some cases, they present great difficulty during the separation of the catalysts from the rest of the reaction medium. In this context, this work aimed at the development of a catalyst based on gold nanoparticles impregnated in polystyrene foams an industrial waste, using thermally induced phase separation as the method of obtaining the same. It is then tested for catalytic reduction of p-Nitrophenol. The gold nanoparticles of different diameters were obtained using different synthesis conditions and characterized by spectrophotometry in the region of the visible for the size measurement, whereas for the already impregnated foams the characterization techniques used were the scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric (TG) analysis and thermogravimetric analysis (DTG). The catalyst was tested using as a model reaction the reduction of p-Nitrophenol to p-Aminophenol, the whole process was accompanied by UV-vis and what is concluded is a variation in the reaction velocities as a function of the variation of the particle size present in the foam and / or their concentrations therein.