Simple microwave irradiation procedure for the synthesis of CuO/Graphene hybrid composite with significant photocatalytic enhancement

In this study, it is demonstrated how the preparation of CuO/Graphene (CuO/G) hybrid composite, can be achieved by an easy, fast and low cost microwave irradiation method. CuO/G hybrid was prepared by dispersion of CuO/graphene-oxide hybrid, followed by microwave irradiation reduction. Investigation of photocatalytic activity of the obtained hybrid exhibits a high performance compared to the commercial copper oxide (CuO), in degradation of methylene blue (MB). Furthermore, increase of the amount of graphene, enhances the average rate constant of the hybrid. In fact, photocatalytic activity of the CuO/G hybrid containing 30% graphene (i.e. 3.051 × 10−2 cm−1) shows almost ∼4.84 times improvement compared to the one of CuO (i.e. 0.63 × 10−2 cm−1). The synthesized hybrids were characterized by SEM, EDS, XRD, Raman, FTIR and UV-vis spectroscopy.