Synthesis and Catalytic Properties of CoFe2O4/Fe2O3 Nanosized Composite Material

Abstract

The present research is devoted to the formation process of a nanoscale composite material with the composition of CoFe2O4/α-Fe2O3. The synthesized material has been studied by the following methods: x-ray phase analysis and scanning electron microscopy. The produced sample is analyzed to be a CoFe2O4 cabic spinel with a unit cell parameters of a = 0.8394 nm and α-Fe2O3. The average crystallite size of the resulting samples, determined by the Debye-Scherrer equation, is 4.8 nm for the cobalt (II) ferrite and 7.9 nm for α-Fe2O3. Reaction rate increase is determined by the incease in hydrogen peroxide amount in the solution. The synthesized composite material is found to exhibit increased catalytic activity in the oxidative degradation reaction of organic dye by hydrogen peroxide. The catalytic activity is established to be particularly high, when the process is occurring in acidic medium. The obtained samples have a highly developed surface and may be of interest as catalysts, adsorbents.