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Ultralight and Superelastic Nanofiber Aerogels with In-Situ Loaded Polypyrrole for High-Efficient Cr(VI) Adsorption

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Abstract

Constructing 3-D nanomaterial-based adsorbents with good mechanical properties has attracted increasing attention. This paper reports a simple strategy to prepare ultralight and superelastic 3-D aerogels as efficient adsorbents for heavy metal Cr(VI) in wastewater by in-situ loading of polypyrrole on cellulose acetate nanofibers followed by freeze-drying method. The obtained aerogel possesses obvious 3-D porous and cross-linked structure, in which polypyrrole is uniformly coated on the nanofiber surface. Besides, the aerogel shows good mechanical properties with high compressive strength of 14.49 kPa, and can be processed into any desired shape. Especially, due to the presence of large specific surface area and high porosity, the obtained nanofiber aerogel shows significant Cr(VI) adsorption with maximum adsorption capacity of 244.65 mg/g. The present work proposes a high-quality nanofiber aerogel for efficiently adsorbing Cr(VI).

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Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Beijing Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Polymer Composites

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The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Polymer Composites, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, North Third Ring Road 15, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029, China

    Dan Li, Huipeng Liu, Ziwen Wang, Zeqian Zhang, Chengzhong Wang, Biao Zhao & Kai Pan

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  1. Dan Li
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  2. Huipeng Liu
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  3. Ziwen Wang
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  7. Kai Pan
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by DL, HL, ZW, ZZ and BZ. The first draft of the manuscript was written by DL and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chengzhong Wang or Kai Pan.

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Li, D., Liu, H., Wang, Z. et al. Ultralight and Superelastic Nanofiber Aerogels with In-Situ Loaded Polypyrrole for High-Efficient Cr(VI) Adsorption. J Polym Environ 31, 637–647 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10924-022-02602-2

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