In this paper, a novel three dimensional carbon boron nitride (3D C-BN) was successfully prepared. The obtained material has porous cheese-like structure and pore size ranging from 2 nm to 100 nm. Attractively, the 3D C-BN, which combines the adsorption advantages of BN and carbon together, exhibits excellent adsorption properties for organic dyes, oils and heavy metal ions. The maximum removal capacities of 3D C-BN for methyl blue (MB) and congo red (CR) are 408 mg g−1 and 307 mg g−1, respectively. Furthermore, 3D C-BN can quickly and efficiently remove oils (salad oil, gasoline and pump oil) and heavy metal ions (Cr3+, Cd2+ and Ni2+) from waste water. The macro bulk 3D C-BN, which is more convenient to use than powdered materials, can be reused by burning or heating in air and still maintains high adsorption capacity. Significantly, these superior performances can find practical application in water purification.

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Developing membranes with excellent mechanical strength and chemical stability is a practically important issue for efficient removal of pollutants from wastewater. In this work, we report on a free-standing membrane fabrication from an activated boron nitride (ABN) micro-ribbon. The membrane techniques we used, combine the intrinsic active adsorption competence of ABN and the mechanical advantages of conventional membrane filtration. The obtained membranes show an excellent removal ability of water pollutants through a simple filtration adsorption process. The examined pollutants include toxic metallic ions and organics. We showed that the dye (like methylene blue) removal ability significantly exceeded that of activated carbon by an order of magnitude at least; lead ions (Pb 2+ ) in wastewater can be nearly fully removed, the starting 5 mg L À1 concentration was reduced to less than 0.01 mg L À1 after the 600 mm-thickness membrane adsorption filtration. Moreover, the membranes can be stacked together to further improve the adsorption capacity because of their high permeability. The excellent reusable performance of the filtration membranes was also confirmed. We believe that the reported work should open the way toward the practical application of ABN membranes in the field of wastewater purification.

Adsorption–photocatalytic synergistic removal of organic pollutants based on porous BN coupled with a small amount of CdS.