Adsorptive Removal of Reactive Orange 122 from Aqueous Solutions by Ionic Liquid Coated Fe3O4 Magnetic Nanoparticles as an Efficient Adsorbent

In the present investigation, a novel adsorbent, ionic liquid modified magnetic nanoparticles (IL-Fe3O4), was successfully synthesized and characterized by FT-IR spectroscopy, ThermoGravimetric Analysis (TGA), XRD analysis, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and theory of Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller (BET) for removal of Reactive Orange 122 (RO-122) from aqueous solutions. The effects of various experimental parameters such as pH, contact time, nanoparticle dosage and ionic liquid amount were studied and optimized. Experimental results indicated that the IL-Fe3O4 nanoparticles had removed more than 98% of proposed dye under the optimum conditions. Detection and quantification limits of the proposed method were 14 and 46µg/L, respectively. Desorption process of the adsorbed dye was also investigated using methanol, ethanol and propanol as the solvent. Both the adsorption and desorption of dye were quite fast. The adsorption process preferably followed the Freundlich isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The RO-122 was removed successfully from environmental water samples too.