Humic acid-induced synthesis of hierarchical basic copper carbonate/AlOOH microspheres and its enhanced catalytic activity for 4-nitrophenol reduction

Abstract

One-pot synthesis of basic copper carbonate/AlOOH microspheres with hierarchical structure in the absence and presence of humic acid is presented. The synthesized microspheres are characterized by SEM, EDS, TEM, XRD, FT-IR and TGA data. The catalytic ability of these hierarchical structures has been evaluated with reduction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol with excess amount of NaBH₄ as a model reaction. The reduction is regarded as a pseudo first-order reaction and the activation energy calculated to from the Arrhenius plots. The urchin-like HA-BBC/AlOOH shows better catalytic performance than the pure BBC/AlOOH samples with flower-like structure.