Ultrasound-assisted synthesis of CoFe2O4/Ce-UiO-66 nanocomposite for photocatalytic aerobic oxidation of aliphatic alcohols

Abstract During the past years, light-driven selective oxidation of various alcohols has attracted increasing attention as a green and eco-friendly manner to convert visible light energy into valuable compounds. In this work, magnetic CoFe2O4/Ce-UiO-66 embedded structure composites are elaborately designed for the photocatalytic oxidation of aliphatic alcohols under visible-light irradiation and aerobic condition at room temperature. The CoFe2O4/Ce-UiO-66 structure was prepared using a simple and fast ultrasound-assisted technique in 60 min at room temperature. As compared with the unmodified CoFe2O4, the embedded composite exhibited better visible-light sensitization performance. The catalyst showed high chemical stability in the reaction conditions and can be recovered quickly and reused for at least five reaction runs in the aerobic oxidation reaction condition.