Banana Peel Carbon that Containing Functional Groups Applied to the Selective Adsorption of Au(III) from Waste Printed Circuit Boards.docVIP

Soft Nanoscience Letters, 2013, 3, 29-36 29 /10.4236/snl.2013.32006 Published Online April 2013 (/journal/snl) Banana Peel Carbon Containing Functional Groups Applied to the Selective Adsorption of Au(III) from Waste Printed Circuit Boards Huajun Zheng , Limin Wang 1,2* 1 1 Department of Applied Chemistry, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China; 2 State Key Laboratory Breeding Base of Green Chemistry Synthesis Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China. * Email: zhenghj@ Received December 28 , 2012; revised January 23 , 2013; accepted February 3 , 2013 th rd rd Copyright ? 2013 Huajun Zheng, Limin Wang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT This paper reports a kind of banana peel carbon (BPC) containing -OH, -NH2 functional groups which prepared through controlling carbonization temperature and its application on the selective adsorption of gold from waste printed circuit boards (PCBs). The adsorption of BPC for Au(III) reached equilibrium in 30 min and the adsorption of Au(III) was favorable at pH 2.5. Meanwhile, the adsorption isotherm showed the maximum adsorption capacity of 801.7 mg/g for Au(III). The results displayed that BPC had a strong selectivity for Au(III) and a negligible affinity to base metal ions, such as Cu(II), Ni(II), Fe(III) and Pb(II). The BPC adsorbent, which absorbed gold, can be recovered completely by HCl-thiourea solution. Keywords: Banana Peel Carbon; Adsorption; Gold(III); Printed Circuit Boards 1. Introduction (Cu(II), Ni(II), Fe(III), Pb(II)) and small adsorption ca- pacities for gold ions are fatally defects fo