Effective removal of ruthenium (III) ions from wastewater by amidoxime modified zeolite X

In this study, Zeolite X was prepared by hydrothermal method, and the amidoxime group was loaded on the zeolite X to prepare amidoxime-modified zeolite X. The effective removal of ruthenium by amidoxime-modified zeolite X in simulated wastewater was investigated. The raw and modified zeolite X were characterized systematically using the BET method, the SEM, the FTIR, the XRD and the XPS to understand the physicochemical changes of the materials, and its sensitivity to Ru3+ adsorption. Batch adsorption experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of adsorbent dose, contact time, solution pH, different initial Ru3+ concentrations, temperature and the effect of competitive ions on Ru3+ adsorption. The modified zeolite X exhibited fast removal performance reaching equilibrium within 30 min at the pH of 3, and the maximum adsorption capacity was found to be 175.4 mg/g. The XRD patterns demonstrated that the modified adsorbent still has the characteristic peak of zeolite NaX, and from the SEM, it can be seen that the modified adsorbent shown the same regular octahedral crystal structure as the zeolite X. In addition, the characterization result of FTIR and XPS indicated the amidoxime group was successfully loaded onto zeolite X. Kinetic parameters were fitted by the pseudo-second order model (R2 = 0.9999), and the adsorption process by the modified zeolite X was chemical adsorption. The adsorption isotherms data of modified zeolite X were well-fitted to the Langmuir (R2 = 0.9834).In the competitive ions effect, the modified zeolite X effectively captured the Ru3+ ion in the presence of Na+ and K+. Therefore, the amidoxime-modified zeolite X could be effectively used as a potential adsorbent for Ru3+ adsorption from wastewater.