Lead removal from water - dependence on the form of carbon and surface functionalization

Chun Sing Kam; Tik Lun Leung; Fangzhou Liu; Aleksandra B Djurišić; Mao Hai Xie; Wai-Kin Chan; Ying Zhou; Kaimin Shih

doi:10.1039/c8ra02264j

Lead removal from water - dependence on the form of carbon and surface functionalization

RSC Adv. 2018 May 18;8(33):18355-18362. doi: 10.1039/c8ra02264j. eCollection 2018 May 17.

Authors

Chun Sing Kam¹, Tik Lun Leung¹, Fangzhou Liu¹, Aleksandra B Djurišić¹, Mao Hai Xie¹, Wai-Kin Chan², Ying Zhou³, Kaimin Shih³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Hong Kong dalek@hku.hk.
² Department of Chemistry, The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Hong Kong.
³ Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Hong Kong.

Abstract

We have investigated lead adsorption on different forms of nanostructured carbon, namely multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) and reduced graphene oxide (RGO) functionalized with different functional groups (hydroxyl, carboxyl, and amino groups). We found that the same functional group does not result in the same performance trends for different nanostructured carbons. Drastically different behavior was observed for the amino-group functionalization, where a significant improvement is observed for MWCNT, while worse performance compared to non-functionalized material is obtained for RGO. On the other hand, hydroxyl and carboxyl group functionalization improves the lead adsorption regardless of the form of carbon. The best performing RGO sample, namely carboxyl group functionalized one, exhibited maximum lead adsorption capacity of 298.49 mg g^-1 which was significantly higher than that of the best performing MWCNT sample (amino-functionalized MWCNT, 58.547 mg g^-1).