One-step Cathodic Electrochemical Synthesis and Characterization of Dextran Coated Magnetite Nanoparticles

In this research, a simple and efficient cathodic electrochemical deposition (CED) route wasdeveloped for the preparation of magnetite nanoparticles (NPs) in an aqueous media. Thesurface of magnetite NPs was also coated for the first time via an in situ procedure during theCED process. In this method, initially, the Fe3O4 NPs (with size ~10 nm) were prepared from theFe2+/Fe3+ chloride bath through CED process. Then, dextran as the coating agent was coatedon the surface of Fe3O4 NPs during the CED process. The prepared NPs were characterizedby different techniques such as XRD, FE-SEM, TEM, IR, TGA, DLS and VSM. The XRD resultsproved the pure magnetite i.e. Fe3O4 crystal phase of the prepared samples. Morphologicalobservations through FE-SEM and TEM revealed particle morphology with nano-sizes of 8nm and 12 nm for the naked and dextran coated NPs, respectively. The dextran coat on thesurfaces of NPs was confirmed by FT-IR and DSC-TGA analyses. The average hydrodynamicdiameters of 17 nm and 54 nm were measured from DLS analysis for the naked and dextrancoated NPs, respectively. The magnetic analysis by VSM revealed that prepared NPs havesuperparamagnetic behavior, i.e. Ms=82.3 emu g–1, magnetization Mr=0.71 emug–1 and Ce=2.3Oe for the naked NPs, and Ms=43.1 emu g–1, Mr=0.47 emu g–1 and Ce=0.81Oe for the dextrancoated NPs. These results implied that this electrochemical strategy can be recognized as aneffective preparation method of polymer coated Fe3O4 NPs.