One-pot hydrothermal-synthesized rGO-Ag nanocomposite as a sensing platform for detection and quantification of methylene blue organic dye and tricyclazole pesticide

Abstract In this work, we established a simple and cost-effective method of dispersing silver nanoparticles on the surface GO nanosheets using a one-pot hydrothermal process with the presence of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as both surfactant and reducing agent. The systematic effects of synthesis conditions on the microstructure and formation of silver nanoparticles on the surface of rGO nanosheets were studied. Notably, the high-crystalline silver nanoparticles with a size of 15 nm were uniformly dispersed on the surface of rGO nanosheets when synthesis conditions were optimized at hydrothermal temperature 160 °C, pH = 9 and 10 mM of silver nitrate precursor. Our analysis results indicate that the as-prepared rGO-Ag nanocomposites exhibit the highest SERS efficiency and good sensitivity with methylene blue organic dye and tricyclazole pesticide. These can be explained by the electron interactions between silver nanoparticles and graphene oxide, which makes unique material advantages for the highly effective detection of pollutant molecules in the environmental monitoring applications.