Simple wet-chemical synthesis of superparamagnetic CTAB-modified magnetite nanoparticles using as adsorbents for anionic dye Congo red removal
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Nowadays magnetic nanomaterials have been focused by many researchers because these nanomaterials have potential applications as adsorbing material for wastewater treatment [1], [2], [3], [4], magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [5], biomedical drug delivery [6] and photocatalyst [7]. Fe3O4 is one of the very promising materials used for wastewater treatment because magnetite nanostructures can be easily separated from solutions by magnetic separation procedure. There are a number of methods used to synthesize this material: microwave-solvothermal [8], hydrothermal process [9], coprecipitation synthesis [10] and electro-synthesis [11]. In this research, simple wet-chemical method was used to synthesize Fe3O4 nanoparticles due to its simple, fast, inexpensive and environmentally benign.
Section snippets
Experiment
To synthesize Fe3O4, 1 mmol of ferric chloride hexahydrate (FeCl3·6H2O) and 2 mmol of iron (II) chloride tetrahydrate (FeCl2·4H2O) were dissolved in 30 ml of deionized (DI) water with vigorous stirring, heated at 60 °C for 30 min and followed by pH adjusting to 13 using NH3 solution. Then, 0.25 and 0.50 g of CTAB were added to the mixed solutions and heated continuously for 30 min to form P1 and P2 precipitates, respectively. In the end finally, black precipitates were separated by filtration,
Results and discussion
XRD spectra (Fig. 1) of products were indexed and compared to the JCPDS database No. 19-0629 [12]. They were specified to correspond with cubic Fe3O4 with Fd-3m space-group symmetry. The diffraction peaks at 30.05°, 35.43°, 37.07°, 43.07°, 53.43°, 56.97° and 62.55° were in correspondence with the (2 2 0), (3 1 1), (2 2 2), (4 0 0), (4 2 2), (5 1 1) and (4 4 0) planes, respectively.
SEM images (Fig. 2a–c) show nanostructure products with their sizes gradually decreased with the increase amount of
Conclusions
In summary, superparamagnetic Fe3O4 and CTAB-coated Fe3O4 nanoparticles were successfully synthesized via facile wet-chemical method. P2 product showed the largest BET surface area and revealed a high removal rate of CR solution with high qm.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank School of Science, University of Phayao, Thailand, and the Center of Excellence in Materials Science and Technology, Chiang Mai University, for financial support under the administration of Materials Science Research Center, Faculty of Science, Chiang Mai University, Thailand.
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