The presence of several organic contaminants in the environment and aquatic compartments has been a matter of great concern in the recent years. To tackle this problem, new sustainable and cost-effective technologies are needed. Herein we describe magnetic biosorbents prepared from trimethyl chitosan (TMC), which is a quaternary chitosan scarcely studied for environmental applications. Core@shell particles comprising a core of magnetite (Fe3O4) coated with TMC/siloxane hybrid shells (Fe3O4@SiO2/SiTMC) were successfully prepared using a simple one-step coating procedure. Adsorption tests were conducted to investigate the potential of the coated particles for the magnetically assisted removal of the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole (SMX) from aqueous solutions. It was found that TMC-based particles provide higher SMX adsorption capacity than the counterparts prepared using pristine chitosan. Therefore, the type of chemical modification introduced in the chitosan type precursors used in the surface coatings has a dominant effect on the sorption efficiency of the respective final magnetic nanosorbents.
Keywords: adsorption; core@shell; hybrid coating; magnetic nanoparticles; sulfamethoxazole; trimethyl chitosan; water treatment.