Functional Porous Carbons from Waste Cotton Fabrics for Dyeing Wastewater Purification

A new functional porous carbons (PC-WF) is prepared by activation-pyrolysis method use waste cotton fabrics (WF) as an abundant, cheap and available precursor for removal of Brilliant Crocein (BC-GR) and Cationic Red 2GL (CR-GL) from aqueous phase. The PC-WF was characterized by BET, FTIR, SEM, and XRD techniques, the surface area, total pore volume, average pore diameter was found as 1463.5 m(2) g(-1), 0.783 cm(3) g(-1) and 2.14 nm, respectively. The influences on BC-GR and CR-GL adsorption of various experimental factors such as initial concentration and temperature were investigated. Adsorption kinetics was found to be best represented by the pseudo-second order model. The adsorption capacity was 319.8 mg g(-1) for BC-GR and 842.5 mg g(-1) for CR-GL at 30 degrees C, respectively. The results indicate that for waste cotton fabrics in particular, the practical application of this process to the production of porous carbon would be possible.