Adsorption Of Typical Environmental Pollutants On MOF-5-derived Nanoporous Carbon

Nanoporous carbon materials with high specific surface area and excellent electrochemical performance have gained more and more attention, and have been widely applied in the fields of gas storage, catalyst support and so on. Nanoporous carbon materials obtained by conventional methods usually got a high surface area but had untunable and random pore structures, which limited their applications. Therefore, the preparation of the nanoporous carbon with superior performance would greatly advance their applications. It has been demonstrated that MOF-derived carbon possesses not only regular and well-defined channel systems but also much higher surface area, which indicates that they may have a huge application potential in the adsorption field. However, to the best of our knowledge, no reports have been found about the adsorption properties of nanoporous carbon derived from MOFs. So this work investigated the adsorption performance of the MOF-5-derived nanoporous carbon (NPC) towards typical environmental pollutants (using sulfamethoxazole (SMX), bisphenol A (BPA) and methyl orange (MO) as target pollutants), and explored the influence of solution properties. The work is expected to provide experimental foundation and theoretical basis for water treatment that NPC involves in. Correspondingly, several studies were conducted as follows:(1) By using MOF-5 (Zn4O(BDC)3) as precursor, NPC was obtained by the method of direct carbonization, and the carbonization temperature of 1000 ℃ was maintained for 8 h. The physical-chemical characterization showed that NPC possessed a surface area of nearly 2000 m2/g, and a pore volume higher than 2 cm3/g.(2) The adsorption performance of NPC towards SMX, BPA and MO were investigated, compared with that of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) and powder active carbon (PAC). It was found that the adsorption kinetics of NPC could be fitted with pseudo-second-order model and the adsorption isotherm could be fitted with Langmuir model. The initial adsorption rate followed the order as MO> SMX> BPA. The adsorption capacity of NPC was much higher than those of SWNT and PAC, and was also higher than those reported. The adsorption performance was influenced by the pore-filling mechanism, solution pH, hydrophobicity and pKa values of chemicals.In this work, typical environmental pollutants were removed effectively by using NPC as adsorbent. The work is expected to provide experimental foundation and theoretical basis, and promote the application and development of NPC in water pollution control areas.