Mesoporous and nanoflowers (ZnO2) via a hydrothermal technique for dye removal and antibacterial applications

In this work, new zinc peroxide (ZnO2) nanoflowers with a petal width of 67.3 nm were created via a new facile hydrothermal reaction at 200 °C for 5 h for efficient dye adsorption and antibacterial applications. In addition, the as-synthesized ZnO2 nanoflowers were described by different techniques, such as BET, FE-SEM and XRD. Moreover, 10 mg of ZnO2 nanoflowers were able to remove 50 ml of (50 mg/L) of methylene blue dye, achieving a high adsorption capacity (239 mg/g). The Langmuir model and pseudo-second-order kinetics characterized the adsorption isotherms and the adsorption kinetics of the methylene blue dye, respectively. The catalytic efficiency still remained without any loss for five runs, showing the high stability of the ZnO2 nanoflowers. Furthermore, the antibacterial test of the ZnO2 nanoflowers were studied in detail for different categories of bacteria (i.e., Gram-negative and Gram-positive). The bacteriostatic activity of the ZnO2 nanoflowers were detected against Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Bacillus subtilis (Bacillus sp.) bacteria. The bacterial growth decreased with an increasing amount of ZnO2 nanoflowers. Finally, the obtained results showed that the ZnO2 nanoflowers are promising materials for the elimination of the dye from wastewater and biological control.