Bio-inspired adsorbent with ultra-uniform and abundance sites accelerate breaking the trade-off effect between adsorption capacity and removal efficiency

Active site is a highly sought-after property in various separation filed because it allows concurrent enhancement of productivity and efficiency. Herein, an ion level sites construction combined with a layer designing rationale is proposed to fabricate the well-active Zn/Al Layered Spinel (Zn/Al-LS) for tetracycline (TC) capture. All the adsorption data fit better with the Pseudo-second-order and Langmuir models. Besides desirable adsorption amount (greater than1800 mg/g), high the selectivity (19.1) to other antibiotics, excellent anti-interference and mineralizing regeneration (adsorption loss <15.03 %) pose a light on the future scale industry application, which effectively addresses limitation of better adsorption with worser removal. Then, detailed Trade-off relation between them is firstly proved and discussed based on mathematical Equation and various studies. Moreover, characterizations identify the positive atomistic role of metal sites, layer structure and pore size of adsorbent, consequently allowing mass TC capture via H-bond, electrostatic interaction, hole-filling and complexation.