Facile synthesis of novel flowerlike magnetic mesoporous carbon for efficient chlorophenols removal

• Novel magnetic mesoporous carbon (MMC) with flowerlike morphology is synthesized.
• Low-cost, hierarchical Mg–Al layered double hydroxides are used as template.
• MMC has high surface areas, large mesopore volume and strong magnetism.
• MMC shows higher adsorption capacity to chlorophenols than other carbon materials.

We present here a novel, low cost and environmental-friendly synthetic strategy for fabricating flowerlike magnetic mesoporous carbon (MMC) microspheres by using silica coated Fe3O4 as core, anisotropic layered double hydroxide (LDH) nanocrystals as hard template and dopamine as carbon source, respectively. The resulting MMC spheres has high surface areas (90.3 m2 g−1), excellent magnetic response (16.99 emu g−1), and large mesopore volume (0.22 cm3 g−1), as well as good chemical inertness and mechanical stability. The MMC spheres were used to adsorb 2,4,6-trichlorophenol (TCP) from simulated water samples. Experiment results suggest that the adsorption was favorable at acidic pH and increased with the rise of initial TCP concentration and temperature. Kinetic parameters were proved to follow the pseudo-second-order kinetics model and the equilibrium data was more favorable for Freundlich isotherm. The equilibrium absorption capacity was 210 mg g−1 at initial TCP concentration of 20 mg L−1 and increased to 587 mg g−1 when the initial TCP concentration was up to 100 mg L−1, which was much higher than those of other carbon-based adsorbents reported in literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on the synthesis of flowerlike MMC material by using LDH as template and its application as adsorbent to remove TCP.

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