CoO modified porous boron nitride fibers for the adsorption and removal of chlortetracycline from aqueous solution

Abstract

Antibiotic pollution in the aquatic environment seriously threatens human health and ecological balance, which violates the trend of sustainable and green development in today's world. Therefore, how to effectively solve the current problem of antibiotic residues in water is highly imminent. Here, we developed CoO modified porous boron nitride fibers (CoO/P-BNFs) by relying on the strong adsorption of polar B–N bonds for cobalt(Ⅱ) to enhance the absorption and removal capacity for chlortetracycline (CTC). The prepared adsorbent was characterized via XRD, FT-IR, XPS, SEM, TEM and BET methods and then the adsorption behavior was explored by batches of experiments. The results indicated that CoO/P-BNFs achieved excellent removal percentage (97.69%) to CTC at 100 mg/L, which far exceeds the P-BNFs (46.08%) and other conventional adsorbents. The kinetics and isotherms could be well described by the pseudo-second-order model and Freundlich model, and the adsorption was a spontaneous exothermic process. In addition, the possible adsorption mechanisms of CTC onto CoO/P-BNFs were mainly π-π and cation-bridge interaction, while other forces such as hydrogen bond, Van de Waals force, electrostatic interaction and pore-filling effect also played an important role. Finally, our research results indicated that CoO/P-BNFs is a promising adsorbent for removing antibiotic contaminants from aquatic environment.