Synthesis, Characterizations and Antimicrobial Activity of Cuprous Oxide (Cu2O) Nanoparticles

Abstract

Cuprous oxide nanoparticles were synthesized by the reduction of copper sulphate pentahydrate salt at different concentration using sodium borohydride as a reducing agent, polyethylene glycol-6000 as a stabilizer by simple, chemical co-precipitation methods and the effect of concentration on particle size were also studied. The crystalline size and phase of Cu2O nanoparticles (NPs) were authenticated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), morphology and structure by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and elemental analysis was carried out by energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The concentration-dependent antimicrobial properties of Cu2O NPs were studied for a different strain of bacteria. XRD and selected area electron diffraction studies (SAED) patterns confirmed the formation of face-centered-cubic Cu2O nanoparticles with size 4.77 nm and 8.02 nm at two different concentrations of 0.01 M and 0.1 M CuSO4, respectively. SEM and TEM images showed that the nanoparticles were uniform, in the form of clusters, and homogeneously distributed. EDX confirmed that synthesized nanoparticles were in pure form having copper and oxygen ratio 3:1 based on the atomic percentage of the chemical species. Cu2O nanoparticles showed excellent antibacterial activity against both bacterial strains Gram-positive (Staphylococcus aureus) and Gram-negative (Escherichia coli). The antibacterial activities of Cu2O NPs were found to be concentration-dependents and large bactericidal effect were seen for Gram-positive (Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria at higher concentrations of Cu2O NPs.

Insight of precursor concentration, particle size and band gap of zirconia nanoparticles synthesized by co-precipitation method

“…The peak at (1 -11) orientation have high intensity than the other peaks, which was attributed to the high crystalline nature of the particular orientation of the samples. Lorentzian fitting was done for each sample to obtain FWHM value and the average grain size of the crystalline samples Z1 and Z2 are estimated as 28.3 nm and 33.3 nm, respectively using Debye Scherrer's equation [11,12], which are comparable with the previous studies [13][14][15]. As the concentration of the precursor solution increases from 0.05M to 0.1M, the particle size also increased from 28.3 nm to 33.3 nm.…”

Antibacterial and Antioxidant Studies of Green Synthesized Silver Nanoparticles using Azadirachta indica (Neem) Leaf Extract

“…Average crystalline size (D) = 0.94λ βcosθ Where, λ is the wave length of X-ray whose value is 0.15406 Å, β is full width at half maximum (FWHM) of most intense peak expressed in radians and θ is Bragg's diffraction angle (Dhungana et al, 2016;Regmi et al, 2019;Gautam et al, 2020).…”

“…methods (Regmi et al, 2019). The synthetic methods used for the preparation of AgNPs often use toxic chemicals as a reducing agent such as NaBH4, citrate, ascorbate etc.…”

Research Trends in Nanotechnology with Microbes in Nepal

“…Since the rapid development of resistant strains of microorganisms leaving limited sensitive antibiotics, the researchers have current interest on metal NPs as an alternative. In Nepal, research was carried on different metal NPs like zinc [6] , cupper [7,8] , Iron [9,10] and silver NPs (AgNPs), but most of the researches were focused upon silver NPs [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] .…”