Magnetic phosphorylated chitosan composite as a novel adsorbent for highly effective and selective capture of lead from aqueous solution.

Separating and recovering lead from heavy metal contaminated wastewater is crucial for the environment remediation and reutilization of lead resources. Herein, a novel adsorbent, the phosphorylated chitosan-coated magnetic silica nanoparticles (Fe3O4@SiO2@CS-P), was successfully fabricated and applied to highly selective adsorption of lead. Competitive experiments were conducted in a multi-ion solution (7 metal ions coexist) at pH 6.0, Fe3O4@SiO2@CS-P exhibited an excellent selectively for capturing lead with the distribution coefficient (0.75 L g-1) more ten times than other metal, while Fe3O4@SiO2@CS demonstrated a highly selective adsorption of silver. These implied that phosphorylation of adsorbent not only improves the sorption performance of lead, but also changes the selective adsorption of metal types. Acidity experiments can draw conclusions that Fe3O4@SiO2@CS-P exhibited better acid resistance (with barely any iron leaching) than silica-uncoated adsorbent (Fe3O4@CS-P) at pH 1.0. Furthermore, the FTIR and XPS spectra after adsorption suggested that the high adsorption performance and selective capture lead were predominantly controlled by the coordination of the phosphate groups on the surface of the adsorbent. This work shows a broad prospect of developing a series of novel, acid-resistant, good reusable and rapidly separable magnetic materials that can be used to efficiently and selectively capture lead from aqueous solutions.

Biopolymer-based flocculants: a review of recent technologies.

Biopolymer-based flocculants have become a potential substitute for inorganic coagulants and synthetic organic flocculants due to their wide natural reserves, environmental friendliness, easy natural degradation, and high material safety. In recent years, with more and more attention to clean technologies, a lot of researches on the modification and application of biopolymer-based flocculants have been carried out. The present paper reviews the latest important information about the base materials of biopolymer-based flocculants, including chitosan, starch, cellulose, and lignin etc. This review also highlights the various modification methods of these base materials according to reaction types in detail. Via the recent researches, the flocculation mechanisms of biopolymer-based flocculants, such as adsorption, bridging, charge neutralization, net trapping, and sweeping, as well as, some other special mechanisms are comprehensively summarized. This paper also focuses on the water treatment conditions, the removal efficiency, and advantages of biopolymer-based flocculants in applications. Further, this review sheds light on the future perspectives of biopolymer-based flocculants, which may make progress in the sources of base materials, modification processes, multi-function, and deepening application researches. We believe that this review can guide the further researches and developments of biopolymer-based flocculants in the future, to develop them with a higher efficiency, a lower cost, more safety, and multi-function for more diversified applications. Graphical abstract.

Two-step synthesis of a single-layer grafting self-floating adsorbent for anionic dyes adsorption, surface separation and concentration.

In the case of a sharp increase in the price of dyes, the dyes concentration of in wastewater is important for environmental protection and industrial costs reduction. In this study, we grafted single-layer amino groups onto the surface of the hollow glass microspheres by a two-step simple synthesis, and the anionic dyes adsorption process reaches equilibrium within 10 min. The as-synthesized adsorbent has self-floating ability to achieve high-efficiency surface solid-liquid separation with water. SEM, EDS, SBET, FT-IR, XPS, TGA characterizations results demonstrated the successful grafting of amino groups and the important role of the pretreatment process in the two-step synthesis. The results of adsorption isotherms and kinetics show the adsorption process belongs to single-layer adsorption with equal adsorption sites, and the adsorption capacities for acid orange 7 and amaranth reach 428.99 mg g-1 and 145.62 mg g-1, respectively. Regeneration of the adsorbent and concentration of the dye solutions can be achieved by dispersing the separated adsorbent in alkaline solution, the maximum concentrated concentration of acid orange 7 and amaranth was 6321.57 mg L-1 and 2431.84 mg L-1, respectively. This study provides new insights for the solid-liquid separation of water treatment agents and the resource regenerating of dyeing wastewater.