Abstract
The removal of heavy metals from drinking water has attracted great interest in water purification technology. In this study, a biocompatible Polyaniline (PANI) polymer filled with TiO2 and ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) is considered as an adsorbent of cadmium iodide from water. Theoretical investigation of the van der Waals (vdW) interactions deduced from the Hamaker constant calculated on the basis of Lifshitz theory was presented. It was found that the surface energy as well as the work of adhesion between water and PANI/NPs across air increases with an increasing volume fraction of the TiO2 and ZnO nanoparticles. Consequently, an increase in the Laplace pressure around the cavities/porosities was found, which leads to the enhancement of the specific contact surface between water and PANI/NPs. On the other hand, for the interactions between CdI2 particles and PANI/NPs surface across water, we show that the interactions are governed principally by the attractive London dispersion forces. The vdW energy and force increase proportionally with the augmentation of the volume fraction of nanoparticles and of the radius of the CdI2 particle. Particularly, the PANI/TiO2 has been proved to be a better candidate for adsorption of cadmium iodide from water than PANI/ZnO.
Highlights
Cadmium metal has become a material that is inescapable for a wide variety of industrial applications such as batteries, alloys, coatings, solar cells, plastic stabilizers, and pigments [1,2,3,4,5]
Due to the higher refractive index of NPs compared with the pure PANI, we find that the refractive indexes n of PANI/TiO2 and PANI/ZnO increases with the increasing the volume fraction Φ of NPs
For the interaction between water and PANI filled with TiO2 and ZnO NPs across air, we demonstrate that the surface energy of PANI/NPs, as well as the work of adhesion between water and PANI/NPs across water, increase with the increasing volume fraction Φ of TiO2 and ZnO NPs
Summary
Cadmium metal has become a material that is inescapable for a wide variety of industrial applications such as batteries, alloys, coatings, solar cells, plastic stabilizers, and pigments [1,2,3,4,5]. Khong [29] investigated the effect of incorporation of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles, single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT), hexanoic acid (HA), and multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWNT) in polyaniline (PANI) nanocomposites for heavy metal removal application. The TiO2 and ZnO fillers are the most used fillers for reinforcing many of the polymer matrices for many applications such as catalysis adsorption [30,31] They exhibit many advantages such as an abundance in nature, biocompatibility, low-cost preparation with different sized and shaped particles (including nanowires, nanotubes, nanofibers, core-shell structures, and hollow nanostructures), photo-catalytic properties, antiseptic and antibacterial properties, and a higher surface energy which may result in a high degradation activity in adsorption [32,33]. The polar component of the nonretarded Hamaker constant HP is function only of the dielectric constants and temperature, and is simplified as follows [43]: HP
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