A facile synthesis of CuO nanowires and nanorods, and their catalytic activity in the oxidative degradation of Rhodamine B with hydrogen peroxide

•CuO nanowires and nanorods were prepared with the assistance of salicylic acid.•The as-prepared CuO nanostructures exhibit significantly improved catalytic activity.•The morphology of CuO nanomaterials will remarkably affect their catalytic activity.

In this study, a new and facile solution-phase route to prepare CuO nanowires and nanorods with the assistance of salicylic acid was reported. Compared with the commercial CuO nanoparticles, both the CuO nanowires and nanorods exhibited significantly improved catalytic activity in the degradation of Rhodamine B with H2O2, which may result from their special one dimensional nanostructures. The apparent activation energy of Rhodamine B oxidation with H2O2 in the presence of the CuO nanowires and nanorods was 30.95 kJ·mol− 1 and 32.07 kJ·mol− 1, respectively, which was much lower than that in the absence of catalysts.

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