ZIF-mediated N-doped hollow porous carbon as a high performance adsorbent for tetracycline removal from water with wide pH range

Abstract The N-doped porous carbon (NPC) and N-doped hollow porous carbons (NHPC-1 and NHPC-2) were fabricated using ZIF-8 and its composites (resorcinol and formaldehyde coated ZIF-8, ZIF-8@RF and tannic acid coated ZIF-8, ZIF-8@TA) as precursors via high-temperature pyrolysis and their applications for removing tetracycline (TC) from water were investigated. The various technologies, including SEM, TEM, FT-IR, Raman, N2 adsorption-desorption, XRD and XPS were used to characterize the morphology, textual property, phase and microstructure of three porous carbon materials. The adsorption isotherms and kinetics of TC on three porous carbon materials were fitted well with Langmuir model and pseudo-2nd order model, respectively. In terms of the Langmuir model, the maximum TC adsorption capacities on the NPC, NHPC-1 and NHPC-2 were 180.2, 284.9 and 518.1 mg g−1 at 25 °C, respectively. The excellent performance of NHPC-2 for TC removal is mainly attributed to the suitable pore size distribution and pore volume, high nitrogen contents and large amounts of defects. High TC adsorption was achieved in 3–10 pH range and hardly affected by humic acid. TC adsorption on NHPC-2 is spontaneous and endothermic process. The NHPC-2 kept excellent TC adsorption capacity even after eight cycles, showing its good repeatability. Our result indicates that the MOF-mediated N-doped hollow porous carbon is promising for the TC removal from aqueous media.