Preparation of silver nanoparticles in the presence of chitosan by electrochemical method.

The present study involves the development of stabilized and densely dispersed chitosan-silver nanoparticles using a green approach based on electrochemical oxidation/complexation process followed by UV irradiation reduction. Formation of the nanoparticles was confirmed by appearance of surface plasmon absorption around 420 nm. The nanoparticles were characterized using transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, elemental analysis, atomic absorption, energy dispersive X-ray, Fourier transform infrared, and UV-Visible spectrophotometry. The obtained nanoparticles were uniform and spherical with average size of 2-16 nm. It was found that increasing the Ag content in the chitosan-Ag based films tends to decrease their equilibrium swelling values. The nanoparticles also demonstrated a relatively high antibacterial activity against Bacillus thuringiensis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria as compared to that of chitosan and the antibacterial activity increased with increasing the nanoparticle concentration. The obtained results revealed that the prepared nanoparticles could be tailored and used in various biomedical applications.