Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2018 (NFM18)
Publication date: 6th July 2018
Water plays an essential role in our daily life and it is in our responsibility to maintain water pure, for trinking and other purposes. Industrial processes provide water pollution by numerous substances including highly toxic inorganic metals (Hg, Ni, Co, etc.), which are not removable by methods applied in conventional wastewater treatment plants. More elaborate cleaning methods, such as ion exchange, electro dialysis, bio-sorption, or photocatalytic degradation have to be applied.[1] Here we attempt to make use of nanoarchitectures from a cheap and mass produced organic pigment, quinacridone, with an especially high surface to volume ratio, to adsorb heavy metals from water. In particular hierarchical nanostructures with the shape of hedgehogs were developed, consisting of nano-needles with ~100 nm diameters arranged to particles with 10 mm overall size. The synthesis of hierarchical pigment was perform via basic decomposition of di-boc-quinacridone with steric amine[2]. To disperse the hydrophobic nanoparticles in water a ligand exchange procedure is performed, resulting in a coverage of the structures with polyethylenimine (PEI). PEI has in addition the ability to form complexes with metal ions[3]. Here this property is demonstrated to useful in water cleaning: PEI is dispersed in water to form complexes with heavy metals, which are subsequently removed from the water by (1) binding them to the quinacridone hedgehog surface via hydrogen bonds, and (2) removing the hedgehogs from the water by sedimentation. In our initial tests 80% of Nickel ions were removed from a 10 mM solution in a single purification step. The nanoarchitectures can also be restored by washing, without any structural changes. The method is also applicable for a series of other heavy metals, making it to a promising tool for water cleaning, especially in relation to electroplating industry, for which heavy metal removal from waste waters is still a challenging and unsolved problem.
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