Silver nanoparticles are widely used as catalyst. However, nanoparticles are easy to agglomerate while hard to recover. For practical application, one of the solutions is to fabricate composites, in which nanoparticles are immobilized onto stable supports. In this work, fungal biomass with intracellular synthesized silver nanoparticles was used as precursor to fabricate composite catalyst. After the intracellular synthesis of silver nanoparticles by <i>Phanerochaete chrysosporium</i>, the nanoparticle rich-biomass was carbonized at 600 degrees centigrade for 2h. The prepared biochar supported silver nanoparticles composites exhibit a carbonaceous framework with mesoporous structure and silver nanoparticles embedded as characterized by SEM, XRD, XPS and BET. The addition of silver improved the porosity during carbonization. Compared to traditional carbothermal synthesized composites, composites synthesized in this way exhibit excellent catalytic ability and reusability on the reduction of 4-NP by excess NaBH<sub>4</sub>, and the rate constant is 58.35 times higher. With the increase of silver load, the composite exhibits better catalytic ability.

Fabrication of fungal biochar supported silver nanoparticles for catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol

2019 Fall National Meeting

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