The immobilization of photocatalyst in polymer fibers has been found to improve photodegradation of dye and recyclability of material. In this study, porous polylactic acid (PLA) fibers were utilized as photocatalyst support using electrospinning technique to synthesis the fibers. The cadmium sulfide (CdS) was embedded in fibers at the amount of wt%, wt%, and wt% as photocatalyst agent with absorption in visible light range. The electrospun fibers experienced increasing in diameter for. times (from nm to nm), due to incorporation of CdS. The synthesized CdS has band gap of. eV, and its presence in composite fibers can be detected by using energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses. The photodegradation was performed under low-powered halogen lamp, with % removal of methylene blue (MB) after hours of irradiation using CdS(wt%)/PLA fibers. This result shows higher performance in comparison with PLA and CdS which could only remove % and % of MB, respectively. The recyclability of composite was tested with satisfying performance; with around % of MB removal was maintained after five times of recycle experiments.
The utilization of hydroxyapatite as an adsorbent has been extensively tested to remove the dye and heavy metal. Yet the adsorbent loss to the environment may lead to secondary pollutant issues. Consequently, the hydroxyapatite was incorporated with Fe3O4 amount variation to solve the secondary pollutant problem by utilizing the magnetic properties of Fe3O4 to recollect the adsorbent. In this work, FESEM images showed a mixture of nano-sizes rods and spherical particles corresponded to the presence of hydroxyapatite and Fe3O4 as a composite. The study found that hydroxyapatite- Fe3O4 (100 wt %) could eliminate 12.434 mg methylene blue/g adsorbent after 4 hours. The hydroxyapatite also gained improvement in its surface area from 59.8m2/g to 75.2m2/g when Fe3O4 is added. In addition, the adsorption of methylene blue fits the Freundlich isotherms and pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Furthermore, the methylene blue removal using hydroxyapatite-Fe3O4 composite can be kept at 80% even after 4 times experiments, showing the recyclability of hydroxyapatite-Fe3O4.
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