CuFe2O4 magnetic nanoparticles: A simple and efficient catalyst for the reduction of nitrophenol

In this paper, we discovered that CuFe2O4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) possessed high catalytic performance in the reduction of nitrophenol for the first time. The as-prepared CuFe2O4 MNPs exhibited several advantages such as stability, monodispersity, low-cost, simplicity and rapid separation performance over other catalysts for the reduction of nitrophenol. The CuFe2O4 MNPs showed high efficiency in the catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol with the conversion of 95% within 40s in the presence of NaBH4. The pseudo-first-order kinetic equation could describe the reduction of 4-nitrophenol with the excess amount of NaBH4. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.