Corncob-derived Activated Carbon for Efficient Adsorption Dye in Sewage

Water pollution is a hot issue in the world today. Therefore, the effective removal of organic pollutants in water has become an urgent problem to be solved. Herein, natural biomass wastes, corncobs as raw materials via a simple carbonization-activation method to prepare corncob-derived activated carbon (CCAC) for dye adsorption in polluted water. The effects of adsorbent dosage, dye concentration, pH and temperature on adsorption performance were also explored. Benefiting from the large specific surface area (2308.27 m2 g–1) and abundant micro-/mesoporous structure of CCAC-900-4, it has the large adsorption capacity (523.18 mg g–1) and a high removal rate of 99.52% for MB. Meanwhile, the maximum adsorption capacity of CCAC-900-4 was 864.58 mg g–1 by Langmuir isotherm fitting. More interestingly, after five cycles of tests, the removal rate of methylene blue by CCAC can still reach 99.34%. This work provides a simple way for the subsequent high value-added utilization of biomass waste resources.