Design of hollow copper nanospheres/reduced graphene oxide nanocomposites for high performance catalytic reduction of p-nitrophenol

The development of functional materials for catalysis applications is a continuing issue, particularly in aqueous-phase catalysis. The creation of inexpensive catalysts with improved catalytic activity is still difficult. In this study, the hollow structured Cu nanospheres decorated on the reduced graphene oxide sheets (h-CuNS/rGO) nanocomposites were successfully prepared and applied in the catalytic reduction of p-nitrophenol (p-NP) in water using sodium borohydride as the reducing agent to obtain industrially useful p-aminophenol (p-AP) within a short time. The structure and morphology of h-CuNS/rGO were studied in order to get a full knowledge of the mechanism underlying the creation of its distinctive hollow structure. In the reduction of p-NP, the h-CuNS/rGO demonstrated significant catalytic activity and reusability. The catalytic hydrogenation mechanism on the surface of h-CuNS/rGO was shown to exhibit a synergistic effect between the catalytic h-CuNS and the supporting rGO. The hollow structure, abundant oxygen vacancies as well as the supported rGO worked together to enhance the catalytic activity during p-NP reduction. Therefore, this work proposes a strategy for the simple synthesis of nanocatalyst with high catalytic performance, which endows the potential applications including catalysis.