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Microwave-assisted high-efficiency degradation of methyl orange by using CuFe2O4/CNT catalysts and insight into degradation mechanism

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Abstract

Microwave-assisted catalytic oxidation technology has become an effective technology for rapid removal of organic pollutants in wastewater. In this research, the removal of methyl orange (MO) from aqueous solution by CuFe2O4 loaded on carbon nanotubes (CuFe2O4/CNTs) under microwave irradiation was studied. The effects of different loadings (1:2, 1:4, 1:8) of CuFe2O4 on the dielectric loss, magnetic loss, dielectric loss factor, magnetic loss factor, and reflection loss of composite materials were studied. The results showed that the microwave adsorption performance was improved by loading CuFe2O4 on CNTs. These different composites were further characterized by SEM, FTIR, and XRD techniques. In addition, this article also studied the effects of different microwave irradiation time, pH, and ionic factors on the degradation of MO. In particular, the mechanism of MO degradation by composite materials under different pH conditions was also studied in detail. The results showed that the removal rate reaches 97% with 5 min under the best conditions, and the composite material had good anti-interference performance. This study may provide a new option to degrade organic dye in wastewater treating.

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Funding

The study was financially supported by the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT-13R17), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51979103, 51679085), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (531107050930, 531107051205), the Funds of Hunan Science and Technology Innovation Project (2018RS3115), and the Key Research and Development Project of Hunan Province of China (2017SK2241).

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  1. Zhifeng Liu, Wei Zhang and Qinghua Liang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Key Laboratory of Environmental Biology and Pollution Control (Hunan University), Ministry of Education, Changsha, 410082, People’s Republic of China

    Zhifeng Liu, Wei Zhang, Qinghua Liang, Jinhui Huang, Binbin Shao, Yang Liu, Yujie Liu, Qingyun He, Ting Wu, Jilai Gong, Ming Yan & Wangwang Tang

Authors
  1. Zhifeng Liu
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  2. Wei Zhang
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  3. Qinghua Liang
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  4. Jinhui Huang
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  5. Binbin Shao
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  6. Yang Liu
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Contributions

Zhifeng Liu: conceptualization, resources, project administration, funding acquisition. Wei Zhang: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, validation, writing—original draft. Qinghua Liang: investigation, validation, writing—original draft. Jinhui Huang: investigation, data curation. Binbin Shao: investigation, validation, writing—review and editing. Yang Liu: investigation, data curation. Min Cheng: data curation. Yujie Liu: resources, project administration. Qingyun He: writing—review and editing. Ting Wu: investigation, data curation. Jilai Gong: data curation. Ming Yan: writing—review and editing. Wangwang Tang: software, writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Zhifeng Liu or Jinhui Huang.

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Liu, Z., Zhang, W., Liang, Q. et al. Microwave-assisted high-efficiency degradation of methyl orange by using CuFe2O4/CNT catalysts and insight into degradation mechanism. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 42683–42693 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13694-z

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