CTAB and SDS assisted facile fabrication of SnO2 nanoparticles for effective degradation of carbamazepine from aqueous phase: A systematic and comparative study of their degradation performance.

In the present study, SnO2 nanoparticles were successfully synthesized by chemical precipitation method using anhydrous aspartic acid and surfactant at two annealing temperatures, 300 °C and 600 °C. The effect of surfactants cationic CTAB and anionic SDS on the synthesized SnO2 nanoparticles (NPs) were studied elaborately. In this article, for the first time, SnO2 NPs were employed as an excellent photocatalyst in the degradation of carbamazepine (CBZ), a popular antiepileptic drug which is most commonly detected pharmaceutically active compounds (PhACs) in municipal wastewater under UV-C light irradiation. Comparative studies between the photocatalytic activity of SnO2 NPs synthesized with CTAB (SC1) and SDS (SS1) on the degradation of the CBZ drug were investigated. Parameters like the effect of catalytic loading, initial concentration, pH and contact time were also studied for optimization. The results indicate that SC1 is a better photocatalyst with rate constant 6.66 × 10-2 min-1 than SS1 with rate 5.7 × 10-2 min-1. To determine the transformation product formed on the photodegradation LCMS (ESI) analysis was done. The synthesized SnO2 NPs can be recycled up to 8th cycles without any notable alteration in its photocatalytic activity.