Synthesis and characterization of modified resorcinol formaldehyde aerogel by graphene/m-phenylenediamine as a novel adsorbent to remove Tetracycline Antibiotics from Wastewater

Recently, there has been growing concern about the presence of pharmaceutical compounds and particularly antibiotics as emerging contaminants. This study employed high specific surface area organic aerogels to remove Tetracycline antibiotics. For this purpose, resorcinol formaldehyde aerogel (RF) was synthesized via the sol-gel process and dried under ambient drying conditions. The synthesized RF aerogel was modified by incorporating 1 wt.%  graphene with 1 wt.% m-phenylenediamine during the synthesis process to prepare RF-G1/PmPDA1. Eventually, the performance of the synthesized samples as adsorbents was evaluated under various parameters such as the effects of pH values (2-12), adsorbent dose (4-10 mg), and adsorbent with antibiotics contact time (3-24 h). FTIR, FESEM, BET, CHN, and EDS tests were conducted to characterize the samples. Afterward, the adsorption rate of Tetracycline antibiotics was measured using UV-Vis. The BET test results revealed that the modification of the RF aerogel sample also increased the specific surface area from 96 to 308 m2/g. The results also discovered that the removal rate of Tetracycline antibiotics for the RF aerogel and RF-G1/PmPDA1 was obtained to be 65.2% and 93.3% at optimal pH of 4 and 4, respectively.