Highly Versatile Gum Acacia Based Swellable Microgels Encapsulating Cobalt Nanoparticles; An Approach to Rapid and Recoverable Environmental Nano-catalysis

Lyophilic microgels based on Gum Acacia (GAC) were synthesized at room temperature and normal pressure. Briefly, high yield of the spherical shaped microgels of size ≤ 50 µm was obtained via introducing linear GAC and divinyl sulfone (DS) in the reverse micelle cores of NBSS in the stirring gasoline. The GAC microgels were then utilized as synthetic micro-templates for fabricating their nanocomposites with Cobalt (Co), to subsequently produce GAC-Co nanocomposite microgels. The as synthesis GAC based microgels and the GAC-Co microgels were characterized through FTIR, TGA, DSC, SEM, EDS, and TEM. Different amounts of GAC-Co microgels were used as nano-catalyst for the degradation of poisonous aromatic compounds and an Azo dye in aqueous medium. Briefly, 1 g GAC-Co microgels degraded 100 mL (250 ppm solution) of each the aforementioned compounds in ≤ 25 min at neutral pH. The increase in the kinetic parameter i.e., rate constant (k app ) value with increase in the GAC-Co nanocomposite microgels amounts manifests the positive impact of the fabricated nano-catalyst on these compounds degradation at room temperature.