Prof. Dr. Shahlaa Esmail Ebrahim and PhD Student Noor Alhuda Alaaldeen Jasim Secure a Patent for Advanced Nanocomposite Research

Prof. Dr. Shahlaa Esmail Ebrahim, a faculty member in the Environmental Engineering Department, obtained a patent from the Central Agency for Standardization and Quality Control \ Ministry of Planning.  It titled:

“Fabrication of a nanocomposite of zinc, manganese, and iron oxides (Zn0.5Mn0.5Fe2O4@Ag-AgVO3) and its use in photocatalytic removal of rhodamine B dye and as an antibody against breast cancer cell lines”

The patent is part of a PhD thesis of the student Noor Alhuda Alaaldeen Jasim, Under the joint supervision with Professor Dr. Saad Hanash Ammar from the Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, Al-Nahrain University, which included the following:

Improving the separation of photocarriers is a vital approach in creating highly effective heterojunction photocatalysts for the photodegradation of environmental pollutants. In this work, coprecipitation and hydrothermal methods were employed in Iraq for the first time to develop new Zn_0.5Mn_0.5Fe₂O₄@Ag-AgVO₃ nanocomposite photocatalysts for the photodegradation of Rhodamine B (RhB) when exposed to visible light. SEM, EDX, UV-vis reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), N₂ adsorption/desorption, TEM, PL and XRD techniques were used to investigate the properties of materials. The Zn_0.5Mn_0.5Fe₂O₄@Ag-AgVO₃ composite photocatalyst demonstrated noticeably higher photocatalytic activity for RhB degradation when compared to the pure constituents AgVO₃, Ag-AgVO₃ and Zn_0.5Mn_0.5Fe₂O₄ samples. The results revealed that when RhB was used at a concentration of 20 ppm, the catalyst Zn_0.5Mn_0.5Fe₂O₄@Ag-AgVO₃ was used to produce the high degradation rate (99.9 % within 180 min), and 3 h of irradiation was sufficient to get the highest chemical oxygen demand (COD) and total organic carbon (TOC) removals (90%). The antitumor effect of the new substance was evaluated against two different cell lines, MCF-7 and normal WRL68 cells (a healthy cell line), using the MTT assay (MTT, 3-4,5-(dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide). This is a colorimetric assay for assessing cell metabolic activity) for 24 hours.