A comparative study of CuO nanoparticle and CuO/PVA-PVP nanocomposite on the basis of dye removal performance and antibacterial activity in wastewater treatment

Contaminated waterways, particularly effluent from the dye industry, are one of the major issues today. Among various methods adsorption is the most straightforward, effective, and successful to treat such effluents. For this purpose Copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO) and Copper oxide nanoparticles embedded within Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and Polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) mixed polymer (CuO/ PVA-PVP) were synthesized using precipitation methods and different analytical techniques such as dynamic light scattering (DLS), UV-Vis, band gap measurement, powdered X-ray diffraction(XRD), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) were used to characterize morphology and size. Synthesized nanomaterials were used for the adsorption of malachite green (MG) dye in aqueous solution by the batch adsorption method. Various experimental conditions e.g. contact time, concentrations, pH, were optimized to obtain the best adsorption outcome. Adsorption kinetics and isotherm suggested that it follows the pseudo-second-order kinetic and Freundlich isotherm that have maximum adsorption capacity of 40 and 76.92 mg/g for CuO and CuO/PVA-PVP, respectively. The in vitro antibacterial activity was investigated using disk diffusion and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) test against Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a gram - positive and Escherichia coli (E. coli), a gram-negative bacteria, where both the synthesized nanoparticles showed a decent antibacterial activity against both the bacterial strain.