CuFe2O4 magnetic nanoparticles: A simple and efficient catalyst for the reduction of nitrophenol

In this paper, we discovered that CuFe 2 O 4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) possessed high catalytic performance in the reduction of nitrophenol for the first time. The as-prepared CuFe 2 O 4 MNPs exhibited several advantages such as stability, monodispersity, low-cost, simplicity and rapid separation performance over other catalysts for the reduction of nitrophenol. The CuFe 2 O 4 MNPs showed high efficiency in the catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol with the conversion of 95% within 40   s in the presence of NaBH 4 . The pseudo-first-order kinetic equation could describe the reduction of 4-nitrophenol with the excess amount of NaBH 4 .