Efficient arsenic(V) and arsenic(III) removal from acidic solutions with Novel Forager Sponge-loaded superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles

Nowadays, there is a wide variety of arsenic decontamination processes being adsorption processes the most efficient. In this concern, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION) have been proposed as an appropriate system to improve arsenic adsorption from acidic wastewater. The number of mines, the amount of ore processed, and thus the amount of mine (acid) wastewaters have been rapidly increased in recent decades. For this reason, arsenic removal from contaminated water is an important goal to accomplish environmental regulations. It is noteworthy that aggregation of these nanoparticles has been detected as the main difficulty, hindering the promising adsorption. In order to overcome this drawback, it is proposed a system to avoid aggregation based on nanoparticles dispersion into an appropriate supporting material. To this purpose, SPION have been fixed on a cellulosic sponge achieving a decrease of the aggregation state, an increase of the active centers, and consequently, arsenic adsorption increases. Experimental results report a lower aggregation of supported SPION over sponge than the observed in the non supported nanoparticles. At this point, a remarkable improvement in the sponge system adsorption capacity is observed in comparison with superparamagnetic nanoparticles in suspension, reaching adsorption capacities about 2.1 mmol As/g SPION and 12.1 mmol As/g SPION for arsenite and arsenate, respectively at pH 3.8. Then, the developed system not only amends the aggregation problem but also keep their nanoproperties intact, making the system a suitable one for arsenic removal in acidic wastewater treatment.

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