Journal of Hazardous Materials, Vol.338, 241-249, 2017
Porous chitosan/hydroxyapatite composite membrane for dyes static and dynamic removal from aqueous solution
The unique characteristics of Chitosan (CS) such as resource abundance, good biocompatibility, film-forming ability and sufficient sites (-NH2 and -OH) for adsorption of heavy metals or organic pollutants make CS-based membranes a promising membrane adsorbent. In this work, a porous Chitosan/Hydroxyapatite (CS/HA) membrane with a sponge-like surface and a three-dimensional interpenetrated porous structure of about mean pore size less than 10 mu m was developed. The most striking advantage of the proposed membrane lies on the integration of appreciably high adsorption capacity (as compared with current CS-based membranes, also 2.5 times and 4 times higher than that of non-porous CS/HA membrane and the commercially available activate carbon) and the high-speed dynamic dye removal (98% or even better in less than 15 min). Besides, the synthesis protocol for the proposed membrane is also much simpler, environmental-friendly and economical. Moreover, the proposed membrane also featured repeated dye removal (above 80% after 5 cycles of dynamic adsorption at dye concentration of 150 mg L-1). All the above advantages indicated the intriguing potential of the porous membrane in practical wastewater treatment. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.