Synthesis, characterization and biocidal effect of copper nanoparticles using l-ascorbic acid as a reducing and capping agent / Younus Rashid Taha Almashhadani ; Supervised Ahmed Soliman Mohamed Fawzi , Ibrahim Mohamed Ismail

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Engineering - Department of Chemical Engineering

Chemical reduction method is one of chemical techniques for synthesis nanoparticles. It has been used to reduce metals such as copper by using copper salts with reducing agents. In this work, copper nanoparticles were synthesized by reduction of copper salt (copper chloride dehydrate; CuCl₂.2H₂O or copper sulfate pentahydrate; CuSO₄.5H₂O) by using L-ascorbic acid as reducing and capping agent at the same time. This thesis presents a study of factors affecting copper nanoparticles synthesis using L-ascorbic acid, where the factors selected are reaction time, molar ratio of L-ascorbic acid to copper salt. Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) used for measuring the size of nanoparticles and size distribution of these nanoparticles while Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) was used to provide information about morphology and crystallographic structure of copper nanoparticles as well as the size of nanoparticles. Antibacterial activity of the copper nanoparticles solutions was examined against pathogenic organisms such as Gram positive bacteria, Gram negative bacteria and fungi. The Minimal Inhibitory Concentration (MIC), Minimum Bactericidal Concentration (MBC) and inhibition zones were determined. The results obtained from this work in antimicrobial field confirm that copper nanoparticles have inhibitory effects and fatal on bacterial and fungal strains selected

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