Organic dye adsorption by HKUST-1

Congo red (CR) is a typical benzidine-based azo dye, has been widely used in dying cotton, wood, and silk. It causes eye burns, which may be responsible for permanent injury to the eyes of wildlife and humans. It can cause nausea, vomiting, profuse sweating, mental confusion, painful micturition, and methaemoglobinaemia if inhaled. Many methods have been developed in the decolorization of CR, such as adsorption, precipitation, reverse osmosis and ion-exchange. Adsorption is one of the most attractive approaches among these possible techniques due to its low cost, versatility and ease of operation. A variety of materials capable of removing CR have been reported. Traditional adsorbent materials have limitations in their application such as low adsorption capacity or difficulty being separated. There was thus a need for an efficient and cost-effective adsorbent that presents large capacity, fast uptake rate and easy separation that could remove organic dyes, such as MB, CR and etc from wastewaters. Among various nanomaterials, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are porous crystalline materials made of metal ions coordinated to organic ligands, have attracted significant attention due to their larger specific surface areas, easy separation, higher porosity, diversity of structures and functions and the analyzed by XRD,SEM,BET and UV. Here HKUST-1, a kind of MOFs with surface area 1500m2/g and pore volume 0.57cm3/g, has been used to remove Congo red dye. To these purpose a particular amount of HKUST-1 added to different concentrations of Congo Red solution and the amount of adsorbed dye measured by UV spectrophotometry and observed that Congo red dye disappeared in 30 minute.