Functional porous carbons from waste cotton fabrics for dyeing wastewater purification

• DOI: 10.1007/s12221-016-5749-8
• Publication Date: 2016-03-01T13:43:40Z
• Authors: Shuhua Wang; Meixia Wei; Qiaoli Xu; Husheng Jia
• Keywords: Cationic polymerization; BET theory; Specific surface area; Carbon fibers

A new functional porous carbons (PC-WF) is prepared by activation-pyrolysis method use waste cotton fabrics (WF) as an abundant, cheap and available precursor for removal of Brilliant Crocein (BC-GR) and Cationic Red 2GL (CR-GL) from aqueous phase. The PC-WF was characterized by BET, FTIR, SEM, and XRD techniques, the surface area, total pore volume, average pore diameter was found as 1463.5 m2 g-1, 0.783 cm3 g-1 and 2.14 nm, respectively. The influences on BC-GR and CR-GL adsorption of various experimental factors such as initial concentration and temperature were investigated. Adsorption kinetics was found to be best represented by the pseudo-second order model. The adsorption capacity was 319.8 mg g-1 for BC-GR and 842.5 mg g-1 for CR-GL at 30 °C, respectively. The results indicate that for waste cotton fabrics in particular, the practical application of this process to the production of porous carbon would be possible.