Plant extract FRAP effect on cation vacancies formation in greenly synthesized wüstite (FexO) nanoparticles: A new contribution

Abstract The Ferrous Reducing Antioxidant Potential (FRAP) of aqueous plant ex-tracts is investigated for the purpose of studying FRAP effect on Fe2+ va-cancies formation in greenly synthesized wustite (FexO) nanoparticles. This study used four aqueous plant extracts as reducing agents with FeCl3 as pre-cursor to synthesize FexO nanoparticles. Plants dealt with in this study are Rosemarinus officinalis.L, Juniperus phoenicia.(L), Matricaria Pubescent.(L), and Artemisia herba-alba.(L). In this paper, a novel study that investigates how variation in FRAP impacts the formation of cation vacancies within greenly synthesized FexO samples was conducted. The synthesized samples are characterized by XRD, SEM, ATR-FTIR, and UV–Vis. Therefore, lattice parameters are calculated through XRD data, and then wustite compositions are calculated using McCammon equation. Results show that the FRAP has a clear effect on Fe2+ vacancies formation within wustite nanoparticles. In- deed, The increase in the FRAP leads to a decrease in Fe2+ defects and consequently an increase in the grain size. Furthermore, studying iron va-cancies’ effect on wustite formation thermodynamic showed that free energy of wustite formation ΔG0f FeO (x) is impacted by cation vacancies and hence by FRAP.