Sonochemical green synthesis of Ag/graphene nanocomposite

Recently, the popularity for green chemistry and chemical process have increased. The approach must comprehensively be considered for these principles in the design of a synthesis method, chemical analysis, or chemical process. Utilization of nontoxic chemicals, environment friendly solvents, and renewable materials are some of the important issues in green synthesis methods. The importance of green synthesis arises in the production of Ag/graphene nanocomposites, due to their future potential applications in nanomedicine and materials engineering. Herein, a simple approach to synthesizing Ag/graphene nanocomposite using sodium citrate as the reducing agent by sonochemical method has been reported. The synthesized Ag/graphene nanocomposite was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and UV-Visible spectroscopy. The results showed that graphene oxide was successfully reduced to graphene and silver ions to silver nanoparticles with sodium citrate. Spherical Ag nanoparticles with a mean particle size of approximately 20 nm on graphene sheets were synthesized sonochemically. The use of sodium citrate as an environment-friendly reducing agent provided green attributes whereas the use of sonochemical processes as the synthesis method provided economic attributes to this study. The results obtained demonstrate this method to be applicable to the synthesis of other metals on graphene sheets and may possibly find various forthcoming medicinal, industrial and technological applications.