Development of a nanosphere adsorbent for the removal of fluoride from water

Kaisheng Zhang; Shibiao Wu; Junyong He; Liang Chen; Xingguo Cai; Kai Chen; Yulian Li; Bai Sun; Dongyue Lin; Guqing Liu; Lingtao Kong; Jinhuai Liu

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2016.04.037

Development of a nanosphere adsorbent for the removal of fluoride from water

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2016 Aug 1:475:17-25. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2016.04.037. Epub 2016 Apr 24.

Authors

Kaisheng Zhang¹, Shibiao Wu², Junyong He¹, Liang Chen¹, Xingguo Cai¹, Kai Chen¹, Yulian Li¹, Bai Sun², Dongyue Lin², Guqing Liu³, Lingtao Kong⁴, Jinhuai Liu²

Affiliations

¹ Nano-Materials and Environmental Detection Laboratory, Hefei Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, Anhui 230031, PR China; Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, PR China.
² Nano-Materials and Environmental Detection Laboratory, Hefei Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, Anhui 230031, PR China.
³ Bureau of Cultivated Land Protection, Sheyang, Jiangsu 224300, PR China.
⁴ Nano-Materials and Environmental Detection Laboratory, Hefei Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, Anhui 230031, PR China. Electronic address: ltkong@iim.ac.cn.

PMID: 27138842
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2016.04.037

Abstract

A new uniform-sized CeCO3OH nanosphere adsorbent was developed, and tested to establish its efficiency, using kinetic and thermodynamic studies, for fluoride removal. The results demonstrated that the CeCO3OH nanospheres exhibited much high adsorption capacities for fluoride anions due to electrostatic interactions and exchange of the carbonate and hydroxyl groups on the adsorbent surface with fluoride anions. Adsorption kinetics was fitted well by the pseudo-second-order model as compared to a pseudo-first-order rate expression, and adsorption isotherm data were well described by Langmuir model with max adsorption capacity of 45mg/g at pH 7.0. Thermodynamic examination demonstrated that fluoride adsorption on the CeCO3OH nanospheres was reasonably endothermic and spontaneous. Moreover, the CeCO3OH nanospheres have less influence on adsorption of F(-) by pH and co-exiting ions, such as SO4(2-), Cl(-), HCO3(-), CO3(2-), NO3(-) and PO4(3-), and the adsorption efficiency is very high at the low initial fluoride concentrations in the basis of the equilibrium adsorption capacities. This study indicated that the CeCO3OH nanospheres could be developed into a very viable technology for highly effective removal of fluoride from drinking water.

Keywords: Adsorption; Carbonate; CeCO(3)OH nanospheres; Fluoride.