Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron DOI 10.1007/s10854-017-7286-7 Magnetically separable Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 @TiO 2 nanostructures supported by neodymium(III): fabrication and enhanced photocatalytic activity for degradation of organic pollution Sobhan Mortazavi‑Derazkola 1  · Masoud Salavati‑Niasari 1  · Mohammad‑Peyman Mazhari 1  · Hossein Khojasteh 1  · Masood Hamadanian 1  · Samira Bagheri 2   Received: 22 March 2017 / Accepted: 2 June 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 1 Introduction Due to industrial wastewater usually contains toxic organic compounds that can be harmful to human health, natu- ral environment, and wildlife many wastewater processes’ studies were extensively carried out in the past few decades [1, 2]. Photocatalysis is a promising method to deal with such wastewater [3, 4]. Light assisted-photocatalyst materi- als (photocatalyst materials in assistance with light) break down the organic pollutants to innocuous the substances such as water, carbon dioxide, or other species in wastewa- ter. The primary advantage of photocatalysis is that it never requires secondary disposal methods. Other treatment tech- niques such as adsorption by activated carbon and air strip- ping merely accumulate pollutants by carrying them over to the adsorbent or air. As a result, these pollutants will never be converted to non-toxic chemicals [5]. Photographic and textile industries widely use organic dyes such as rho- damine B (RhB) and methyl orange (MO) which threat human and animal life, if they are released unprotected in nature as they are carcinogenic [6, 7]. Many attempts have been put on the shape and size-controlled preparation of nanostructures to photocatalytic degradation [8–15]. Titanium oxide (TiO 2 ) nanoparticles are more widely used in photocatalytic oxidation degradation compared to the other semiconductor photocatalysts because of the great quantity of free hydroxyl production, thermal stability, non- toxicity, disinfection, environmentally-friendly nature, and waste treatment purpose [16–19]. Titanium dioxide has been extensively studied in a variety of applications such as killing cancer cells, destruction pollutants and harmful bacteria [20, 21]. One major disadvantage of TiO 2 is the post-treatment process which is difcult and costly. In order to overcome this issue, magnetically separable composite photocatalysts have been widely utilized in many industrial Abstract In this contribution, neodymium ion doped Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 @TiO 2 magnetic nanoparticles with uniform magnetic cores have been successfully synthesized for the frst time. The Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 @TiO 2 @Nd nanoparticles were obtained using photodeposition method and the crys- tal structure, chemical properties and surface morphology of the novel photocatalyst were characterized by XRD, EDS, SEM, TEM, DRS, FT-IR and VSM techniques. The magnetic core covered by neodymium shell within was about 2–5 nm thickness and the core–shell particles size was about 65 nm. Incorporated of neodymium in TiO 2 nanoparticles reduce charge recombination and increases the accessible surface area of titanium dioxide nanoparti- cles. Nd carrier demonstrated an electron-scavenging abil- ity to mitigate electron–hole pair recombination, which can be improved the photocatalytic activity. In comparison to Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 @TiO 2 , Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 @TiO 2 @Nd exhibited higher photocatalytic activity for the degradation of rhoda- mine B (RhB) as a cationic dye and methyl orange (MO) as anionic dye under UV–Visible light irradiation (93.4% of RhB and 79.2% of MO were degraded after 90 min). More importantly, the magnetic catalyst displayed good magnetic response and recoverable after seven cycles. The results demonstrate that synthesized nanocatalyst shows a high stability, recoverability and highly efciency for purifca- tion of wastewater. * Masoud Salavati-Niasari Salavati@kashanu.ac.ir 1 Institute of Nano Science and Nano Technology, University of Kashan, P.O. Box 87317-51167, Kashan, Iran 2 Department of Physic, Centre for Research in Nanotechnology & Catalysis (NANOCAT), University of Malaya, 3rd Floor, Block A, Institute of Postgraduate Studies (IPS) building, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia