Plant extract-strategy using Teucrium Polium stems to green synthesize Ag/AgCl bionanocomposite imprinted on Fe3O4/kaolinite and potentials in catalytic and chemosensor applications

Abstract

A two-component bionanocomposite was produced with an easy and green method and was expanded to the three and four-component nanostructures. In fact, the Ag/AgCl sample with the mean diameter of about 22 nm was biosynthesized using the aqueous extract of Teucrium Polium and then it was imprinted on kaolinite to produce the Ag/AgCl/kaolinite bionanocomposite with a particle size range of 5–35 nm. For the first time, the four-component Ag/AgCl/Fe 3O4/ kaolinite bionanocomposite, composed of the 19 nm nanorods of Fe 3O4 in the vicinity of the 29 nm Ag/AgCl nanospheres was synthesized with the same method to promote the properties and applications. All the products could be utilized in the aqueous media, as both the useful biosen- sors to detect of Hg 2+ with a minimum concentration of 100 lM and the efficient catalysts for the reduction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol in 10–50 min. It’s remarkable that the as-prepared composites were characterized using the various techniques such as UV-Vis, FT-IR, XRD, FE-SEM, and EDX. Further, the vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) measurement revealed