Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Environmental Engineering & Innovation and Development Center of Sustainable Agriculture & Research Center of Sustainable Energy and Nanotechnology, National Chung Hsing University, 250 Kuo-Kuang Road, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 2 Department of Civil Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan
  • 3 School of Chemical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, Penang, Malaysia
  • 4 Department of Environmental Health Engineering, Abadan Faculty of Medical Sciences, Abadan, Iran. Electronic address: Ghanbari.env@gmail.com
  • 5 Department of Environmental Engineering & Innovation and Development Center of Sustainable Agriculture & Research Center of Sustainable Energy and Nanotechnology, National Chung Hsing University, 250 Kuo-Kuang Road, Taichung, Taiwan. Electronic address: linky@nchu.edu.tw
Chemosphere, 2020 Dec;261:127552.
PMID: 32731015 DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2020.127552

Abstract

As cobalt (Co) represents an effective transition metal for activating Oxone to degrade contaminants, tricobalt tetraoxide (Co3O4) is extensively employed as a heterogeneous phase of Co for Oxone activation. Since Co3O4 can be manipulated to exhibit various shapes, 2-dimensional plate-like morphology of Co3O4 can offer large contact surfaces. If the large plate-like surfaces can be even porous, forming porous nanoplate Co3O4 (PNC), such a PNC should be a promising catalyst for Oxone activation. Therefore, a facile but straightforward method is proposed to prepare such a PNC for activating Oxone to degrade pollutants. In particular, a cobaltic coordination polymer with a morphology of hexagonal nanoplate, which is synthesized through coordination between Co2+ and thiocyanuric acid (TCA), is adopted as a precursor. Through calcination, CoTCA could be transformed into hexagonal nanoplate-like Co3O4 with pores to become PNC. This PNC also shows different characteristics from the commercial Co3O4 nanoparticle (NP) in terms of surficial reactivity and textural properties. Thus, PNC exhibits a much higher catalytic activity than the commercial Co3O4 NP towards activation of Oxone to degrade a model contaminant, salicylic acid (SA). Specifically, SA was 100% degraded by PNC activating Oxone within 120 min, and the Ea of SA degradation by PNC-activated Oxone is 70.2 kJ/mol. PNC can also remain stable and effective for SA degradation even in the presence of other anions, and PNC could be reused over multiple cycles without significant loss of catalytic activity. These features validate that PNC is a promising and useful Co-based catalyst for Oxone activation.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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