Synthesis of Magnetic Lignin-Based Hollow Microspheres: A Highly Adsorptive and Reusable Adsorbent Derived from Renewable Resources

Abstract

Lignin, a byproduct of the wood-pulping industry, is mostly treated as a noncommercialized waste product. Therefore, it is significant to study its potential for the conversion of this renewable and sustainable resource into high-valued chemicals and materials. In this study, a renewable lignin-based material with high performance in wastewater treatment has been explored on account of its satisfactory properties and being environmentally friendly. Herein, lignin hollow microspheres (LHM) were facilely prepared from esterified organosolv lignin with maleic anhydride (MA) via self-assembly in the mixed tetrahydrofuran−Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles aqueous media. Moreover, the magnetic lignin spheres (MLS) were also successfully fabricated by introducing Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles. The structural changes of esterified lignin polymers were identified and morphology and property of obtained LHM and MLS were characterized by means of TEM, SEM, VSM and FT-IR. In addition, the adsorption capacities of MLS for methylene blue and Rhodamine B from aqueous solutions were also comparatively investigated. It was observed from SEM and TEM images that the LHM from larch lignin exhibited uniform spherical and dense surface, but that from poplar lignin was not rigid enough to keep the perfect spherical shape and partially collapsed. The adsorption capacity results showed that the MLS from larch lignin exhibited better adsorption properties for methylene blue (31.23 mg/g) and Rhodamine B (17.62 mg/g) than that from poplar lignin (25.95 and 15.79 mg/g, respectively). Simultaneously, the adsorption kinetics and adsorption isotherm experiments indicated that the data were agreed well with the pseudo-second-order and Langmuir model, respectively. Moreover, after three cycles of desorption, the removal efficiencies of the MLS from larch and poplar lignin could still reach more than 98% and 96%, respectively. Therefore, the developed magnetic lignin-based hollow microspheres has shown a great potential as a low-cost, highly adsorptive and reusable adsorbent for the applications in the wastewater treatments.

Structural Variation of Lignin and Lignin–Carbohydrate Complex in Eucalyptus grandis × E. urophylla during Its Growth Process

“…Therefore, these materials have been drawn great attention on the development of biomass adsorbents (Das et al, 2010;Guo et al, 2008). Among the biomass materials, lignin has many advantages of adsorption owing to the specific functional groups and spatial structure features (Dizhbite et al, 1999;Li et al, 2016a;Brandt et al, 2013).…”

Pretreatment of Wheat Straw with Phosphoric Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide to Simultaneously Facilitate Cellulose Digestibility and Modify Lignin as Adsorbents

“…Obviously, PHPLs exhibited greater adsorption capacity than PL, which was probably due to a relatively higher oxygen-containing functional groups content on PHPLs via oxidative modification. By contrast, MB adsorption capacities of lignins and lignin-based materials were 31.2-80.6 mg g −1 (see Table 4) [40,[42][43][44][45]. Thus, the excellent adsorption capacity of PHPLs made them in application more feasible.…”

Synthesis, modification and use of lignified bamboo isolate for the renovation of crystal violet dye effluent

“…Among these adsorbents is lignin which is one of the most abundant organic polymers in plants, just behind cellulose (Chen 2014). Several studies (Zhingang et al 2017;Yinliang et al 2016;Adebayo et al 2014;Menkiti and Aniagor 2017) have reported the existence of various functional groups such as methoxyl, phenolic, carboxyl, aromatic, alcohol, hydroxyl, aldehyde, etc., in lignin. These available functional groups explain lignins' potential in the remediation of dye effluent.…”

“…Several publications exist on the application of lignin in dye adsorption processes; study by Yinliang et al (2016) showed the comparison of lignin obtained from larch and poplar tree for the uptake of methylene blue Dye. Zhingang et al (2017) evaluated the uptake of methylene blue (MB) from simulated wastewater using Cortaderia selloana flower spikes and its carbon fiber derivative as adsorbents.…”