Efficient Removal of La(III) and Nd(III) from Aqueous Solutions Using Carbon Nanoparticles

Abstract

Environmental pollution caused by release of toxic metals (rare earth elements, etc.) into aquatic environment as a result of industrial activity is one of the serious global issues, thus development of different efficient methods for removal of these metals from wastewaters seems to be important subject today. Carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) are well-known to have the superior adsorption efficiency toward heavy metals in aqueous solution. However, little research has been dedicated to exploit their use for the removal of rare earth elements (REEs) from contaminated water. Therefore, the environmental application of CNPs to remove Lanthanum (La III) and Neodymium (Nd III) from wastewater was performed. In this work, Adsorption experiments were carried out by batch mode adsorption to investigate the influence of different conditions that enhanced the adsorption of La(III) and Nd(III) by CNPs such as pH of solution, adsorbent dose, contact time, and initial concentration of investigated rare earth elements. The obtained results showed that the optimum adsorption for the removal both studied metals from contaminated water were 0.02 g/25 ml of CNPs at pH 7.0 after 40 min of adsorption. This work demonstrates that CNPs can be considered as potential adsorbents to target metal ions from wastewater.