Sulphur Ligand Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes for Removal of mercury from waste water – experimental and density functional theoretical study

Abstract

Owing to the strong interaction of mercury with sulphur, thiol(SH) and dithiocarbamate (DTC) ligands were grafted on multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and were characterized by elemental analysis, SEM-EDS, FTIR, and XRD analysis. The maximum adsorption capacity of MWCNT-DTC was found to be 3.5 times higher than that of MWCNT-SH at the optimum pH of 6. The kinetics and equilibrium data revealed that the adsorption of Hg2+ follow pseudo-first-order and Langmuir isotherm model, respectively. Density functional theoretical calculation performed for the interaction of Hg2+ ion with SWCNT-DTC and SWCNT-SH corroborated the experimental output that former have greater adsorption than the later.Test- L2