Abstract
Arsenic in drinking water causes serious health problems and must be brought below the permissible 10 ppb limit rapidly, for on-spot remediation. Household reverse osmosis (RO) units remove As(III) partially. To address this, a post-RO adsorbent is developed based on iron‑manganese binary oxide nanoparticles (IMBNP) impregnated nylon 6 fibre (IMBNP-nylon 6). By optimizing H2SO4 concentration and by reducing temperatures of both IMBNP impregnation and subsequent vacuum drying, IMBNP size on fibre surface could be reduced from 320 to 75 nm. This resulted in increased IMBNP loading on the fibre from 1.4 to 9.3–10 wt%, giving a high adsorption capacity of 48.7 mg As(III)/g of IMBNP-nylon 6 fibre. IMBNP has a synergistic role here, since its MnO2 component oxidises As(III) to As(V), which is more effectively adsorbed by its Fe2O3 component; this in contrast to poor adsorption of As(III), when only Fe2O3 is used. The IMBNP-nylon 6 composite, in continuous fixed bed experiments with feed water of 100 ppb As(III), facilitates removal of arsenic below 10 ppb level, with only 39 s contact time. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential scalability of this technique to treat a large amount of arsenic-containing permeate water in household RO units.
Published Version
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