One pot low temperature synthesis of graphene coupled Gd-doped ZnFe₂O₄ nanocomposite for effective removal of antibiotic levofloxacin drug

Nanocomposites of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) coupled gadolinium doped ZnFe₂O₄ (GZFG) have been successfully one pot in-situ synthesized adopting low temperature solution process from zinc nitrate, iron nitrate, gadolinium acetate and graphene oxide with varying concentrations of gadolinium (upto 10% Gd with respect to Zn) in the precursor medium. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy studies confirm the presence of single phase cubic spinel structure of ZnFe₂O₄ that uniformly distributed over the rGO layers. With increasing Gd doping concentration in precursor medium, the average crystallite size of ZnFe₂O₄ diminishes gradually from ~11 to ~5.5 nm. Raman and X-ray photoelectron spectral analyses confirm an existence of interaction between rGO and ZnFe₂O₄ in GZFG samples. Using antibiotic levofloxacin in water, the drug removal capacity (DRC) of GZFG has been performed by optimization of parameters such as gadolinium doping concentration in precursor medium, solution pH, etc. However, the gadolinium doping leads to an improvement in DRC of the nanocomposite and the 5% Gd doped sample shows about 86% DRC at the optimized condition. This simple strategy can be utilized in the synthesis of rGO coupled Gd doped other metal oxide nanocomposites for DRC application.