Water contamination caused by hazardous organic dyes has drawn considerable attention, among all of the techniques released, adsorption has been widely used, which however to a large degree is dependent on the development of high efficiency adsorbents. Waste biomass based porous carbon is becoming the new star class of adsorbents, and thus contribute more to the sustainable development of the society. In this work, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, abundant waste fallen Platanus orientalis leaves are employed as the raw material for hierarchical activated porous carbon(APC) microspheres via a mild hydrothermal carbonization(210 ℃,12.0 h) followed by one-step calcination(750 ℃, 1.0 h). The APC microspheres exhibit a specific surface area of 1355.53 m^2·g^-1 and abundant functional groups such as O—H and C=O. Furthermore, the APC microspheres are used as the adsorbents for removal of Rh B and MO, with the maximum adsorption capabilities of 557.06 mg·g^-1 and 327.49 mg·g^-1, respectively, higher than those of the most porous carbon originated from biomass. The adsorption rates rapidly approach to 98.2%(RhB) and 95.4%(MO) within 10 min. The adsorption data can be well fitted by Langmuir isotherm model and the pseudo-second-order kinetic model, meanwhile the intra-particle diffusion and Boyd models simultaneously indicate that the diffusion within the pores is the main rate-limiting step. Besides, the APC microspheres also demonstrate good recyclability, and may also be applied to other areas such as heterogeneous catalysis and energy storage.
Density functional theory has been confirmed as a reliable approach in the descriptions of inhomogeneous fluids.By integrating the density functional theory into the revised local average density model, a theoretical approach is constructed to investigate the local shear viscosity in the confined conditions. In the density functional theory,the weighted density approximation for attractive part and the modified fundamental measure theory for repulsion contribution are adopted to accurately describe the inhomogeneous systems. By comparing with simulation data, the theoretical model is tested. In this work, the shear viscosities of methane are calculated in different external fields(on a hard wall, a solvophobic wall and in slit pores with different widths). In addition, the effects of temperature on the local density and viscosity are also considered. It shows that the effect of temperature on the shear viscosity is more obvious on solid surfaces. The calculation provides an approach to determine the viscosity under confined conditions, which is extremely significant in real industrial applications.
A facile eco-friendly hydrothermal route(180 °C, 12.0 h) has been developed for the first time to the uniform hierarchical porous MgBO_2(OH) microspheres without the aid of any organic additive, surfactant or template, by using the abundant MgCl_2·6 H_2 O, H_3BO_3 and NaOH as the raw materials. The as-obtained porous microspheres exhibit a specific surface area of 94.752 mg·g^(-1), pore volume of 0.814 cm3·g^(-1), and ca. 84.0% of which have a diameter of 2.25–3.40 μm. The thermal decomposition of the porous MgBO_2(OH) microspheres(650 °C,2.5 °C·min^(-1)) leads to the porous Mg_2B_2O_5 microspheres with well-retained morphology. When utilized as the adsorbents for the removal of CR from mimic waste water, the present porous MgBO_2(OH) microspheres exhibit satisfactory adsorption capacity, with the maximum adsorption capacity q^(-1) mof 309.1 mg·g, much higher than that derived from most of the referenced adsorbents. This opens a new window for the facile green hydrothermal synthesis of the hierarchical porous MgBO_2(OH) microspheres, and extends the potential application of the 3 D hierarchical porous metal borates as high-efficiency adsorbents for organic dyes removal.
