Environmentally benign plant-based polymeric organogel for wastewater treatment

Abstract

Designing thermally and chemically stable adsorbents with higher efficiency than traditional adsorbents for wastewater treatment from natural resources has been getting the attention of the scientific community recently. In our search for better toxic dye adsorbents, in the present investigation, we have designed polymeric organogel by interacting polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) with cellulose diacetate (CA) using phthalic anhydride (PA) as the cross-linker. Here, cellulose diacetate (CA) was synthesized from cellulose phytochemically extracted from Dalbergia sissoo bark biomass. The cross-linking of CA with PA improved the polymeric organogel's stability and its dye adsorption capability over the pristine polymeric (PVA) organogel (12 %). The structure, morphology, and thermal stability of the organogel were evaluated using various state-of-the-art analytical techniques. The polymeric organogel offers 78% (223.46 mg/g) adsorption capability for the crystal violet (cationic), 69% (181.3 mg/g) for the congo red (anionic) against the 52%, and 48% of pristine PVA-based hydrogel. Based on the findings, produced organogel might be used as an environmentally safe, thermally stable, and more effective adsorbent for removing synthetic dyes from wastewater.