Issue 39, 2019

Packaging vertically aligned carbon nanotubes into a heat-shrink tubing for efficient removal of phenolic pollutants

Abstract

Owing to their extremely high surface-to-volume ratio, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are excellent adsorbents for the removal of organic pollutants. However, retrieval or collection of the CNTs after adsorption in existing approaches, which utilize CNTs dispersed in a solution of pollutants, is often more challenging than the removal of pollutants. In this study, we address this challenge by packaging vertically aligned CNTs into a PTFE heat-shrink tubing. Insertion of CNTs into the tubing and subsequent thermal shrinkage densified the CNTs radially by 35% and also reduced wrinkles in the nanotubes. The CNT-based adsorption tube with a circular cross-section enabled both easy functionalization of CNTs and facile connection to a source of polluted water, which we demonstrated for the removal of phenolic compounds. We purified and carboxylated CNTs, by flowing a solution of nitric acid through the tubing, and obtained adsorption capacities of 115, 124, and 81.2 mg g−1 for 0.5 g L−1 of phenol, m-cresol, 2-chlorophenol, respectively. We attribute the high adsorption capacity of our platform to efficient adsorbate-CNT interaction within the narrow interstitial channels between the aligned nanotubes. The CNT-based adsorption tubes are highly promising for the simple and efficient removal of phenolic and other types of organic pollutants.

Graphical abstract: Packaging vertically aligned carbon nanotubes into a heat-shrink tubing for efficient removal of phenolic pollutants

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
25 May 2019
Accepted
12 Jul 2019
First published
17 Jul 2019
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

RSC Adv., 2019,9, 22205-22210

Packaging vertically aligned carbon nanotubes into a heat-shrink tubing for efficient removal of phenolic pollutants

S. M. Moon, H. Min, S. Park, A. Zhexembekova, J. K. Suh and C. Y. Lee, RSC Adv., 2019, 9, 22205 DOI: 10.1039/C9RA03948A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements