Assessment of Ethidium bromide and Ethidium monoazide bromide removal from aqueous matrices by adsorption on cupric oxide nanoparticles

• We report the EtBr and EMA adsorption mechanism on effective adsorbent such as CuO nanoparticles.
• The nanoparticle CuO showed large adsorption capacity for EtBr and EMA.
• The adsorption capacity of EtBr and EMA on CuO nanoparticles to temperature showed the best fit with pseudo-second-order model.

The present study was undertaken to develop an effective adsorbent and to study the adsorption of Ethidium bromide and Ethidium monoazide bromide from aqueous solution using the CuO nanoparticles. The characteristics of CuO nanoparticles were determined and found to have a surface area 89.59 m2/g. Operational parameters such as pH, contact time and adsorbent concentration, initial concentration and temperature were also studied. The amount of removal increases with the increase in pH from one to seven and reaches the maximum when the pH is nine. Adsorption data fitted well with the Langmuir, Freundlich and Florry–Huggins models. The results show that the best fit was achieved with the Langmuir isotherm equation with maximum adsorption capacities of 0.868 and 0.662 mg/g for Ethidium bromide and Ethidium monoazide bromide, respectively. The adsorption process was found to follow pseudo-second-order kinetics. The calculated thermodynamic parameters, namely ΔG, ΔH and ΔS showed that adsorption of Ethidium bromide and Ethidium monoazide bromide was spontaneous and endothermic under examined conditions.

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