Abstract
The environmental fate and risks of ciprofloxacin (CIP) in the subsurface have raised intensive concerns. Herein, the transport behaviors of CIP in both saturated quartz sand and sand/multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) mixtures under different solution ionic strength of the solution and coexisting cation types were investigated. Batch adsorption experiments highlighted growing adsorptive capacity for CIP with the increasing content of MWCNTs in the MWCNTs-quartz sand mixtures (from 0.5% to 1.5%, w/w). Breakthrough curves (BTCs) of CIP in the MWCNTs-quartz sand mixtures were well fitted by the two-site chemical nonequilibrium model (R2 > 0.833). The estimated retardation factors for CIP increased from 9.68 to 282 with growing content of MWCNTs in the sand column, suggesting the presence of MWCNTs significantly inhibited the transport of CIP in saturated porous media. Moreover, the values of retardation factors are negatively correlated with the ionic strength and higher ionic strength could facilitate the transport of CIP in the saturated porous media. Compared with monovalent cations (Na+), the presence of divalent cations (Ca2+) significantly facilitated the transport of CIP in the columns due to the complexation between CIP and Ca2+ as well as deposition of MWCNTs aggregates on the sand surface. Results regarding CIP retention in columns indicated that MWCNTs could enhance the accumulation of CIP in the layers close to the influent of sand columns, while they could hinder upward transport of CIP to the effluent. This study improves our understanding for transport behaviors and environmental risk assessments of CIP in the saturated porous media with MWCNTs.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financially supported by the Program for the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51879101, 51579098, 51809090), the National Program for Support of Top–Notch Young Professionals of China (2014), the National Innovative Talent Promotion Program of China (2021), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT-13R17), and Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Plan Project (2018SK20410), and the Science and Technology Innovation Program of Hunan Province (2020RC4014).
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R.X. wrote the manuscript and responded for methodology and formal analysis; D.H. responded for supervision, validation, project administration, and funding acquisition; L.D. and L.S. collected the sample and measured the concentration of CIP; L.G., H.C., and Z.T. reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published this version of the manuscript.
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Xiao, R., Huang, D., Du, L. et al. Transport and retention of ciprofloxacin with presence of multi-walled carbon nanotubes in the saturated porous media: impacts of ionic strength and cation types. Environ Geochem Health 46, 153 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-024-01927-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-024-01927-2