Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers and Materials https://doi.org/10.1007/s10904-020-01463-3 Fabrication of TiO 2 Reduced Graphene Oxide Based Nanocomposites for Efective of Photocatalytic Decolorization of Dye Efuent Mai Foaad Elshahawy 1  · Ghada Adel Mahmoud 1  · Amany Ismail Raafat 1  · Amr El‑Hag Ali 1  · El said Ahmed Soliman 2 Received: 5 November 2019 / Accepted: 1 February 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Reduced graphene oxide (RGO) were successfully prepared through chemical reduction of GO that was prepared by modifed Hummer’s method. Characterization of GO and RGO was performed using di ferent techniques and they were trapped in acrylic acid (PAAc) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) to form (PVA/PAAc)–GO and (PVA/PAAc)–RGO nanocomposites using gamma irradiation technique. Characterization the prepared nanocomposite was investigated using X-ray difraction (XRD), Fourier transforms infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). TiO 2 was also trapped in the nanocomposite matrix to perform (PVA/ PAAc)–GO–TiO 2 and (PVA/PAAc)–RGO–TiO 2 nanocomposite hydrogels. It was found that the crystallite size of (PVA/ PAAc)–TiO 2 , (PVA/PAAc)–GO–TiO 2 and (PVA/PAAc)–RGO–TiO 2 nanocomposite calculated using Debye–Scherrer’s equation are 52.8, 26.02, and 23 nm, respectively. The surface morphology explained a good dispersion of GO within (PVA/PAAc)–GO–TiO 2 and (PVA/PAAc)–RGO–TiO 2 appears as a porous structure. The photocatalytic activity of the obtained nanocomposites was tested for the photodecolorization of direct blue 71 dye (DB71) in the aqueous medium under UV light. A complete decolorization of DB71 was achieved after 40 min at pH 6 in the presence of 2 mL/L hydro- gen peroxide. The rate of photodecolorization follows Langmuir Hinshelwood pseudo-frst-order kinetics. It was also obtained that (PVA/PAAc)–RGO–TiO 2 nanocomposites can be reused for ten times with full activity. Extended author information available on the last page of the article