Preparation and characterization of graphene – TiO 2 nanocomposite for enhanced photodegradation of Rhodamine-B dye Mohamed H.H. Ali, Afify D. Al-Afify, Mohamed E. Goher ⇑ National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries (NIOF), Egypt article info Article history: Received 18 October 2018 Revised 13 November 2018 Accepted 22 November 2018 Available online 1 December 2018 Keywords: Photocatalysis TiO 2 Graphene oxide Nanocomposite XRD Rh-B dye TEM abstract The synthesizing of TiO 2 @rGO nanocomposites using an efficient method has been carried out to enhance the photodegradation activities of TiO 2 . Reduced graphene oxide (rGO) synthesis has been illustrated as a key step. The preparation of TiO 2 @rGO is highly needed and recommended to develop an effective way for the reduction of GO. Our study illustrated an environmentally simple method for TiO 2 @rGO prepara- tion and demonstrated its efficiency for photocatalytic process by utilizing rhodamine-B dye as an organic pollutant. Synthesized nanoparticles of reduced TiO 2 @rGO have an observable increase in photo-energy adsorption leading to the increase of the photodegradation reactions. From the obtained results, TiO 2 @rGO nanocomposites showed great ability to absorb photo-energy and enhance the pho- todegradation reactions. Moreover, the results revealed that the 3% TiO 2 @rGO have the best performance than 1% TiO 2 @rGO at pH = 9.0, 30 mg/l initial dye concentration and 60 min irradiation duration. The reduced graphene oxide production was considered as an influential co-catalyst for improving the TiO 2 photocatalytic activities mainly owing to; the fast separation of h + /e  and the adsorption improvement. Our study affirms the production of promising applicable particles using the environmental photocatal- ysis process in particular with regard to wastewater purification. Ó 2018 Hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Introduction The degradation of the organic pollutants in wastewater using the photocatalytic process has attracted great attention, especially TiO 2 which has a remarkable role in the remediation of environ- mental pollutants; this is why it has been identified as one of the most optimistic photocatalysts because it is economically inexpen- sive, nontoxic, is found in considerable resources and has high cat- alytic activities under solar energy (Tatsuma et al., 2001; Sajan et al., 2016; Jiang et al., 2016; Wei et al., 2017). The use of TiO 2 nanoparticles as a photocatalyst to initiate the redox chemical reactions and detect the best conditions is effective in the photodegradation processes of different organic pollutants under UV irradiation as mentioned by many studies (Bubacz et al., 2010). Recently, valuable works have been carried out to enhance the photocatalytic efficiency of TiO 2 . Pu et al. (2017) demonstrated that the high degradation activities were produced using TiO 2 @rGO, which highly exceed the photodegradation rate of the bare titanium oxide. On the other hand, Wang et al. (2016) revealed that the doping of boron with rhythmical anatase/rutile ratio of titanium oxide exhibited four times higher atrazine degra- dation reaction rate than the naked TiO 2 . Additionally, the rhodamine-B degradation rate improved up to seven times using combined titanium oxide with g-C 3 N 4 through facile calcination method (HaO et al., 2016). Recently, carbonaceous materials, e.g. graphene, were incorpo- rated with TiO 2 . These substances have high carrier mobility and large surface area and are considered as an important route to increase the degradation activities of TiO 2 (Zhou et al., 2011; Posa et al., 2016). The resultant nanocomposites, arising from the combination of both TiO 2 and grapheme, have more advantages than bare TiO 2 as it could not only prevent h + /e  recombination by the transfer of the photo-excited electron to the surface of gra- phene, but also improve the adsorptive capacity via the increase of the surface area of TiO 2 (Jiang et al., 2017). Furthermore, numerous works have been applied to incorporate graphene with TiO 2 to improve its photocatalytic activities using different methods, such as physical mixing, electrochemical deposition, hydrothermal and sol-gel methods (Lee et al., 2012; Pan et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2010). Williams et al. (2008) illustrated an easy strategy to produce effectiveness sheets of rGO. Simultaneously, the photoactive TiO 2 /rGO composites could be synthesized. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejar.2018.11.009 1687-4285/Ó 2018 Hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer review under responsibility of National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: smgoher@yahoo.com, ms.goher@niof.sci.eg (M.E. Goher). Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research 44 (2018) 263–270 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research journal homepage: www.sciencedirect.com/locate/ejar