Recently, carbon nanostructures have attracted interest because of their unique properties and interesting applications. Here, CoC@SiO2-850 (3) and CoC@SiO2-600 (4) cobalt-carbon/silica nanocomposites were prepared by solid-state pyrolysis of anthracene with Co(tph)(2,2'-bipy)·4H2O (1) complex in the presence of silica at 850 and 600 °C, respectively, where 2,2'-bipy is 2,2'-bipyridine and tph is the terephthalate dianion. Moreover, Co(μ-tph)(2,2'-bipy) (2) was isolated and its X-ray structure indicated that cobalt(ii) has a distorted trigonal prismatic coordination geometry. 2 is a metal-organic framework consisting of one-dimensional zigzag chains within a porous grid network. 3 and 4 consist of cobalt(0)/cobalt oxide nanoparticles with a graphitic shell and carbon nanotubes embedded in the silica matrix. They were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). XPS revealed that the nanocomposites are functionalized with oxygen-containing groups, such as carboxylic acid groups. In addition, the presence of metallic cobalt nanoparticles embedded in graphitized carbon was verified by XRD and TEM. The efficiency of 3 for adsorption of crystal violet (CV) dye was investigated by batch and column experiments. At 25 °C, the Langmuir adsorption capacity of 3 for CV was 214.2 mg g-1 and the fixed-bed column capacity was 36.3 mg g-1. The adsorption data were well fitted by the Freundlich isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The adsorption process was spontaneous and endothermic.
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