As industrialization
progresses, there is a large release of hazardous
pollutants into the environment. These pollutants, which contain nitro
compounds and organic dyes, are extremely dangerous due to their toxic
and carcinogenic nature. An efficient, environmentally benign, and
economical catalyst to degrade environmental pollutants or convert
them into useful products has been of sustained interest in recent
years. In this context, we report a simple and inexpensive combustion
fabrication of NiCrFeO
4
using different fuels such as glycine,
polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and urea, showing tremendous catalytic and
photocatalytic functionalities. Rietveld refinement and X-ray diffraction
studies confirmed the formation of single-phase ferrites, with crystallite
sizes ranging from 3.9 to 43.31 nm. The values of optical band gap,
obtained from the diffused reflectance spectroscopy technique, lie
in the visible region range (1.50–1.60 eV), and hence, all
the synthesized ferrites can act as good photocatalysts in the presence
of visible light. All the NCF nanocatalysts were utilized for the
reduction of nitroarenes and photocatalytic degradation of various
cationic (RhB and MB) and anionic (MO) dyes and their mixture. NCFP
displayed excellent activity for the reduction and oxidation reactions
owing to its large surface area and low optical band gap. Furthermore,
the photo-oxidative degradation by NCFP was also enhanced due to its
low recombination of charge carriers as confirmed by the photoluminescence
(PL) spectroscopy. NCFP efficiently reduces nitrobenzene to aminobenzene
with 95% yield using sodium borohydride as the reducing agent in methanol
medium at RT in 10 min. The results of photocatalytic activity have
shown that the degradation efficiency of NCFP follows the order RhB
> MB > MO in their unitary solution. Furthermore, in the case
of the
mixture of dyes, NCFP showed enhanced photocatalytic degradation for
cationic dyes (RhB and MB) compared to that of anionic dye (MO). From
the performance point of view, this catalyst can be useful in industrial
application because of its high stability, greater catalytic efficiency,
and cost-effectiveness.