Facile synthesis of Zr incorporated chitosan/gelatin composite for the sequestration of Chromium(VI) and fluoride from water.

The development of industrialization and agricultural activities have carried various negative impacts to living organisms in recent decades and also, the frequent problem of inorganic pollution have been environmental anxiety to the community. Among these, Cr and F are priority poisonous pollutants from many industries. In this work, we present a low-cost synthesis procedure to obtain biocompatible zirconium incorporated chitosan-gelatin composite (CS-Zr-GEL) were fabricated and explored for the adsorptive removal of toxic Cr and F from water. The adsorption mechanism of toxic Cr and F was done by batch mode as a function of contact time, solution pH and co-existing ions. The obtained materials were extensively studied by several physico-chemical techniques to access their properties by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis. Additionally, the fabricated adsorbent is highly dependent on solution pH. The kinetic and isotherm data were fitted using pseudo-second-order kinetic and Langmuir isotherm models. The maximum adsorption capacity for CS-Zr-GEL is 138.89 and 12.13 mg/g at 323K for Cr and F respectively. These findings demonstrate that the CS-Zr-GEL adsorbent represents a promising candidate that would have a practical influence on water/wastewater treatments.