Filtration properties of hierarchical carbon nanostructures deposited on carbon fibre fabrics

Abstract

Hierarchical carbon nanostructures have been produced and examined for their use in liquid filtration experiments. The nanostructures are based on carbon nanotube growth and graphite oxide sponge deposition on the surface of commercially available carbon fibre fabrics. The hierarchical nanomaterial construction on the carbon fibre fabric is made possible due to the chemical vapour deposited carbon nanotubes which act as anchoring sites for the solution deposited sponge nanomaterial. The nanomaterials show a high capacity for Rhodamine B filtration, with the carbon fibre—carbon nanotube—graphite oxide sponge fabric showing filtering performance comparable to a commercial activated carbon filter. After 40 successive filtrations of 10 mg ml−1 Rhodamine B solution, the filtrate of dual modified fabrics returned an increase in transparency of 94% when measured at approx. 550 nm compared to 72% for the commercial carbon filter. When normalised with respect to the areal density of the commercial filter, the increase in optical transparency of the filtrate from the dual modified fabrics reduces to 65%. The Rhodamine B is found to deposit in the carbon nanomaterials via a nucleation, growth and saturation mechanism.