“…Nanostructured particles, especially metal nanoparticles (NPs), have attracted much attention over the last decade (Djerahov, Vasileva, Karadjova, Kurakalva & Aradhi, 2016;Kang et al, 2016;Nazirov, Pestov, Privar, Ustinov, Modin & Bratskaya, 2016;Sadanand, Rajini, Rajulu & Satyanarayana, 2016), and have also been widely studied in different fields from materials science and engineering to biomedical applications (Li, Liu & Liu, 2012;Tada, Kiyonaga & Naya, 2009;Walekar et al, 2014). Among these applications, the use of catalytic metal NPs in waste water treatment is of particular interest because of their unique electronic properties and versatile catalytic activities (Daniel & Astruc, 2004;Narayanan & El-Sayed, 2005;Zheng & Stucky, 2006).…”