Morphology-controlled hydrothermal synthesis of copper selenides with orange juice for highly efficient cationic dyes adsorption

The development of low-cost and highly efficient adsorbents is of great significance in the treatment of dye wastewater. In this work, a facile one-pot hydrothermal method is developed for the synthesis of copper selenides (CuSe) using orange juice as the reducing and coating reagent. The morphology of CuSe can be regulated by simply optimizing the amount of orange juice. Three different microscopic morphologies of CuSe are obtained, which include dendritic CuSe, flower-like CuSe, and spherical CuSe. Because of the porousness, abundant side-branch structure, and strong electrostatic adsorption, dendritic CuSe can be used to efficiently adsorb cationic rhodamine 6G (R6G) dye. Freundlich model is found to be suitable for R6G adsorption isotherm. These results demonstrate that the dendritic CuSe prepared using natural juice as raw material can be potentially applied to remove organic dyes pollutants in wastewater.