TiO2 immobilized on polyarylene ether nitrile/Fe3+ complex for efficient adsorption and photocatalytic degradation towards methylene blue

In recent years, metal ions have been cross-linked with composite to improve their adsorption capacity, which has a wide range of applications in environmental treatment, biomedicine and other fields. In this work, Fe3+ was complexed with block polyarylene ether nitrile (PEN) to form regular cubic blocks, which provided sufficient sites for the attachment of TiO2. Four types of PEN-Fe3+@TiO2 hybrid cubes were successfully prepared by changing the content of TiO2. The adsorption and photocatalytic degradation properties of PEN-Fe3+@TiO2 were evaluated by UV-Vis spectrophotometer. The results showed that the adsorption capacity of PEN-Fe3+@TiO2 increased with the increase of TiO2, and the maximum adsorption capacity and the photocatalytic degradation ratio reached 914.42 mg/g and 99%, respectively. The effect of pH on the adsorption capacity was further studied and it was found that the PEN-Fe3+@TiO2 composites showed better adsorption property under alkaline conditions. Moreover, the adsorption kinetic fitting showed that the whole adsorption process obeyed the pseudo-second-order kinetic model, which indicated that the adsorption process was dominated by chemical adsorption. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.