Facile fabrication of the porous adsorbent from natural plant Angelica Sinensis stabilized liquid foam for dye removal

Abstract

Porous materials as emerging high-efficiency adsorbents have attracted increasing attention in recent years, due to the high specific surface area, fast adsorption rate, favorable adsorption capacity to heavy metal, dyes, and other pollutants, etc. Among various approaches, the foam template method with the advantage of flexible operation and controllable pores structure is proposed to prepare net type of porous adsorbents with superior adsorption capacity and rapid adsorption rate. In this process, natural plant Angelica Sinensis (AS) was treated with a simple alkaline-heat process, and the resultant product was used firstly to prepare foam with high stability, and the positive effect of the cellulose dissociation and the conversion of ligustilide into amphiphilic moleculars on improving the stability of Pickering foam was revealed. The liquid foam can serve as pore-foaming template and precursor of polymerization for synthesizing porous adsorbent by one-step integrated process of free radical polymerization and silane hydrolysis. The porous adsorbent showed the sufficient porous structure and excellent adsorption performance for cationic dye, with maximum adsorption capacities of 386.13 mg g-1 and 284.20 mg g-1 for methyl violet (MV) and malachite green (MG). In a word, the novel approach can provide an important reference for green synthesis of high stable foam and the superporous material, and the adsorbent showed great application potential in the field of water treatment.

Keywords

• Adsorbent
• Angelica Sinensis
• Pickering foam
• Adsorption
• Dye