Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
36
Novel Carbon-Based Nanoadsorbents
for Water
Puriication
Nishith Verma and Ashutosh Sharma
Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India
CONTENTS
36.1 Water and Water Pollutants .............................................................................................. 738
36.2 Wastewater Treatment and Adsorption ......................................................................... 738
36.3 Carbon-Based Adsorbents ................................................................................................ 739
36.4 Novel Carbon Nanoadsorbents ....................................................................................... 740
36.5 Surface Morphology of a Hierarchical Web of ACF/CNF and Micro-/
Nanocarbon Particles ........................................................................................................ 74 2
36.6 Surface Area and PSD ....................................................................................................... 746
36.7 Nongraphitic ACF .............................................................................................................. 747
36.8 ACF/CNF as Adsorbents .................................................................................................. 749
36.9 Carbon Micro-/Nanoparticles as Adsorbents for Arsenic .......................................... 753
References ..................................................................................................................................... 755
With its many interesting physicochemical properties, carbon continues to attract the
attention of scientists and engineers alike. Consequently, it is the most cited element in
the scientiic literature. If you search for “carbon” on the webpage of any scientiic journal
that publishes reports on materials, the chance that the search will hit the page limit is
signiicantly high. Therefore, in the context of wastewater treatment, it is not surprising
that although the utility of carbon in its allotropic form of charcoal was recognized many
years ago, dating back to the prehistoric era, it remains the core material of modern water
ilters. In recent times, with nanotechnology applied to the many facets of environmental
remediation, either in process intensiication or product development, several groups are
on the forefront of developing novel carbon-based nanoadsorbents for water puriication.
This chapter presents an overview of such carbon-based materials developed as adsor-
bents, the methods of their preparation, and their ability to remove dissolved solutes in
wastewater, primarily arsenic and luoride, two common contaminants present in ground-
water. This chapter also discusses the surface characterization of the adsorbents using
several state-of-the-art analytical instruments, including atomic force microscopy, scan-
ning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and Brunauer-
Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area analyzer and pore size distribution (PSD) measurements,
as well as the relevance of these characterization tests to the physicochemical properties of
the prepared materials.
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