Synthesis of seaweed-ZnO-PANI hybrid composite for adsorption of methylene blue dye

Abstract

In this paper, the preparation, characterization and methylene blue dye (MB) adsorption capability of novel biocompatible hybrid composite of Seaweed–Zinc oxide–Polyaniline (SW–ZnO–PANI) were investigated. A new hybrid composite consisting of aniline and SW–ZnO composite was prepared by polymerization using an APS as initiator. The SW–ZnO composite have been effectively assembled onto the surface of the synthesized polyaniline via electrostatic attraction. The synthesized material were characterized by using UV–vis, FTIR, XRD, HR-SEM and BET analysis. The results showed that SW–ZnO composite was successfully grown on the surface of polyaniline. The SW–ZnO–PANI hybrid were further applied to remove MB, the effect of pH, initial dye concentration and adsorbent amount of dye adsorbed were investigated using a batch experiment. The pseudo first order and pseudo second order kinetic models were used to describe the kinetic data. It was observed that the pseudo-second-order kinetic model described the adsorption process better than first pseudo-first-order. The Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption model were used for the numerical depiction of equilibrium data, and the best fit was obtained using the Freundlich isotherm model. These results indicate that the hybrid materials of SW–ZnO–PANI could be employed as an efficient adsorbent much more than the parent material adsorption of MB dye.