Utilization of gel-type polystyrene host for immobilization of nano-sized hydrated zirconium oxides: A new strategy for enhanced phosphate removal.

Abstract The urgent need for eutrophication control motivated the development of many novel adsorbents for enhanced phosphate polishing removal. Among these, zirconium-based nanomaterial was regarded as an effective kind because of its ability to bind phosphate specifically via inner-sphere complexation. In this study, we proposed a new strategy to improve the efficiency of zirconium oxides (HZO) nanoparticles by immobilizing them onto a gel-type anion exchange resin covalently attached with ammonium groups, denoted as HZO@N201. A previously developed macro-porous polymeric nanocomposite HZO@D201 was used for comparison. The immobilized nanoparticles in HZO@N201 were well dispersed in the gel matrix, manifesting smaller particle size and richer surface hydroxyl groups in comparison to HZO@D201. As a result of the structural merits in collective, HZO@N201 not only exhibited superior phosphate adsorptive capacity and affinity towards phosphate to HZO@D201, but also facilitate phosphate diffusion, based on isotherm, pH and kinetic tests. Mechanistic study by XPS and 31P SS-NMR substantiated the selective phosphate adsorption pathway as the formation of inner-sphere complexes by HZO@N201, which exhibited enhanced reactivity than HZO@D201. Lastly, fixed-bed runs of HZO@N201 was conducted, achieving an effective treatable volume of 2000 BV, which was 600 BV more than HZO@D201. Additional adsorption-regeneration cycle confirmed its reusability and potential for practical application. We believe the gel-type polymeric host could facilitate the formation and dispersion of smaller sized nanoparticles, exposing more surface hydroxyl groups highly accessible to phosphate. The results of this paper offer insights to a new strategy for immobilization of functional nanoparticles aiming at enhanced adsorptive removal of phosphate.