Mercury nano-trap for effective and efficient removal of mercury(II) from aqueous solution

Baiyan Li, Yiming Zhang, Dingxuan Ma, Zhan Shi and Shengqian Ma ()
Additional contact information
Baiyan Li: University of South Florida
Yiming Zhang: University of South Florida
Dingxuan Ma: State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University
Zhan Shi: State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University
Shengqian Ma: University of South Florida

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Highly effective and highly efficient decontamination of mercury from aqueous media remains a serious task for public health and ecosystem protection. Here we report that this task can be addressed by creating a mercury ‘nano-trap’ as illustrated by functionalizing a high surface area and robust porous organic polymer with a high density of strong mercury chelating groups. The resultant porous organic polymer-based mercury ‘nano-trap’ exhibits a record-high saturation mercury uptake capacity of over 1,000 mg g−1, and can effectively reduce the mercury(II) concentration from 10 p.p.m. to the extremely low level of smaller than 0.4 p.p.b. well below the acceptable limits in drinking water standards (2 p.p.b.), and can also efficiently remove >99.9% mercury(II) within a few minutes. Our work therefore presents a new benchmark for mercury adsorbent materials and provides a new perspective for removing mercury(II) and also other heavy metal ions from contaminated water for environmental remediation.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6537 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms6537

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6537

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().