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Interaction of carbonaceous nanomaterials with wastewater biomass

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Abstract

Increasing production and use of carbonaceous nanomaterials (NMs) will increase their release to the sewer system and to municipal wastewater treatment plants. There is little quantitative knowledge on the removal of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), graphene oxide (GO), or few-layer graphene (FLG) from wastewater into the wastewater biomass. As such, we investigated the quantification of GO and MWCNTs by UV-Vis spectrophotometry, and FLG using programmable thermal analysis (PTA), respectively. We further explored the removal of pristine and oxidized MWCNTs (OMWCNTs), GO, and FLG in a biomass suspension. At least 96% of pristine and O-MWCNTs were removed from the water phase through aggregation and 30-min settling in presence or absence of biomass with an initial MWCNT concentration of 25 mg∙L–1. Only 65% of GO was removed with biomass concentration at or above 1,000 mg∙L–1 as total suspended solids (TSS) with the initial GO concentration of 25 mg∙L–1. As UV-Vis spectrophotometry does not work well on quantification of FLG, we studied the removal of FLG at a lower biomass concentration (50 mg TSS∙L–1) using PTA, which showed a 16% removal of FLG with an initial concentration of 1 mg∙L–1. The removal data for GO and FLG were fitted using the Freundlich equation (R 2 = 0.55, 0.94, respectively). The data presented in this study for carbonaceous NM removal from wastewater provides quantitative information for environmental exposure modeling and life cycle assessment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Yu Yang, Zhicheng Yu & Paul Westerhoff

  2. School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Takayuki Nosaka

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    Kyle Doudrick

  4. The Polytechnic School, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ, 85212, USA

    Kiril Hristovski

  5. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Pierre Herckes

Authors
  1. Yu Yang
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  2. Zhicheng Yu
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  3. Takayuki Nosaka
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  4. Kyle Doudrick
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  5. Kiril Hristovski
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  6. Pierre Herckes
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  7. Paul Westerhoff
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Correspondence to Yu Yang.

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Yang, Y., Yu, Z., Nosaka, T. et al. Interaction of carbonaceous nanomaterials with wastewater biomass. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. 9, 823–831 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-015-0787-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-015-0787-9

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