Decontamination of radioactive cesium ions using ordered mesoporous monetite

Ali F Tag El-Din; Emad A Elshehy; Mahmoud O Abd El-Magied; Asem A Atia; Mohamed E El-Khouly

doi:10.1039/c8ra02707b

Decontamination of radioactive cesium ions using ordered mesoporous monetite

RSC Adv. 2018 May 23;8(34):19041-19050. doi: 10.1039/c8ra02707b. eCollection 2018 May 22.

Authors

Ali F Tag El-Din¹, Emad A Elshehy², Mahmoud O Abd El-Magied², Asem A Atia³, Mohamed E El-Khouly¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Kafrelsheikh University Kafr El-Sheikh 33516 Egypt mohamedelkhouly@yahoo.com.
² Nuclear Materials Authority P. O. Box 530, El Maadi Cairo Egypt.
³ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Menoufia University Menoufia Egypt.

Abstract

We report herein the fabrication of an environmentally friendly, low-cost and efficient nanostructured mesoporous monetite plate-like mineral (CaHPO₄) as an adsorbent for removal of radioactive cesium ions from aqueous solutions. The phase and textural features of the synthesized mesoporous monetite were well characterized by XRD, FTIR, SEM, HRTEM, DLS, TGA/TDA, and N₂ adsorption/desorption techniques. The results indicate that the cesium ions were effectively adsorbed by the mesoporous monetite ion-exchanger (MMT-IEX) above pH 9.0. Different kinetic and isotherm models were applied to characterize the cesium adsorption process. The fabricated monetite exhibited a monolayer adsorption capacity up to 60.33 mg g^-1 at pH of 9.5. The collected data revealed the higher ability of CaHPO₄ for the removal of Cs(i) from aqueous media in an efficient way.