Dee Garret, Shayoub Hend, McNeill Helen, Lozano Itziar Sánchez, Rafferty Aran, Gun'ko Yurii K
School of Chemistry, University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland
Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Spain.
RSC Adv. 2023 Apr 3;13(16):10513-10522. doi: 10.1039/d3ra01112g.
Removal of dye pollutants from wastewater is among the most important emerging needs in environmental science and engineering. The main objective of our work is to develop new magnetic core-shell nanostructures and explore their use for potential removal of pollutants from water using an external magnetic field. Herein, we have prepared magnetic core-shell nanoparticles that demonstrated excellent dye pollutant adsorbent properties. These nanoparticles are composed of a manganese ferrite magnetic core coated with silica, to protect the core and enable further functionalisation, then finally coated with ceria, which is shown to be an effective adsorbent. The magnetic core-shell nanostructures have been synthesized by a modification of solvothermal synthesis. The nanoparticles were fully characterised at each stage of the synthesis by powder X-ray diffraction (pXRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). These particles were found to be effective in removing methylene blue (MB) dye from water, which was validated by UV-visible (UV-vis) spectroscopy. These particles can be quickly removed from solution using a permanent magnet and then can be recycled after being placed in the furnace at 400 °C to burn off any organic residues. The particles were found to retain their ability to adsorb the pollutant after several cycles and TEM images of the particles after several cycles showed no change in the morphology. This research demonstrated the capacity of magnetic core-shell nanostructures to be used for water remediation.
从废水中去除染料污染物是环境科学与工程领域最重要的新需求之一。我们工作的主要目标是开发新型磁性核壳纳米结构，并探索利用外部磁场从水中潜在去除污染物的用途。在此，我们制备了具有优异染料污染物吸附性能的磁性核壳纳米颗粒。这些纳米颗粒由包覆有二氧化硅的锰铁氧体磁性核组成，以保护核心并实现进一步功能化，最后包覆二氧化铈，二氧化铈被证明是一种有效的吸附剂。磁性核壳纳米结构通过对溶剂热合成法进行改进而合成。在合成的每个阶段，通过粉末X射线衍射（pXRD）、透射电子显微镜（TEM）、振动样品磁强计（VSM）和傅里叶变换红外光谱（FTIR）对纳米颗粒进行了全面表征。通过紫外可见（UV-vis）光谱验证发现，这些颗粒能有效去除水中的亚甲基蓝（MB）染料。使用永久磁铁可快速从溶液中分离出这些颗粒，然后将其置于400°C的炉中燃烧掉任何有机残留物后即可回收利用。发现这些颗粒在几个循环后仍保持吸附污染物的能力，并且几个循环后颗粒的TEM图像显示形态没有变化。这项研究证明了磁性核壳纳米结构用于水修复的能力。
