Green Synthesis of CuS:Co and CuS:Ni Nanoparticles Using Moringa oleifera Leaf Extract and Investigations On Their Photocatalytic, Electrochemical, Nonlinear Optical and Antibacterial Properties

Nanostructured copper sulfides are now recognised as industrially relevant materials with a wide range of uses in novel technical areas such as photovoltaics, energy storage, sensors, electronics, and catalysts. For these applications, it is very important to design CuS’s microstructures with atomic levels and superficial energy levels which can be controlled effectively with doping. Cus has been doped with Co and Ni in this work. Physico-chemical methods of synthesizing CuS NPs employ hazardous solvents or reagents with potentially adverse effects. As an alternative approach, greener method employing leaf extract has been utilized to synthesize doped CuS NPs. Cobalt doped CuS (CuS:Co) and nickel doped CuS (CuS:Ni) nanoparticles with an optimized Co and Ni doping concentration (5 wt.% of the weight of CuCl2.6H2O) has been green synthesized using M. oleifera leaf extract. There aren't many reports in the literature about the green-synthesised CuS:Co and CuS:Ni NPs' catalytic and antibacterial characteristics. The phytochemicals found in M.oleifera leaf extract are expected to dominate the physical properties of the NPs synthesized. Photodegradation efficiencies were found to be respectively 93.9% and 91.8% for the CuS:Co and CuS:Ni NPs for the degradation of metanil yellow (MY) dye after 105 min under visible light irradiation. Enhanced third order NLO and antibacterial activities was exhibited by the CuS:Co NPs. A high third order nonlinear optical susceptibility of 6.45 × 10−6 cm2/W was achieved for CuS:Co. CuS:Co NPs demonstrated improved electrochemical performance due to low charge transfer resistance and high specific capacitance.