Gadeer

It was reported that in dye industry, 15 % of dye is lost during dyeing process. These dye effluents released to the environment without any treatment will cause significant issues to the environment, toxicological, aquatic life etc.

Bio-absorption is considered to be superior over other techniques due to cost effectiveness, design simplicity, ease in operation etc. In the past few years, more and more biomass material have been studied for this purpose, but a critical challenge lies in the low absorption efficiency, especially compared to the conventional activated carbon.

In my work, functionalized CNC is used to resolve the low efficiency problem in this area. The high absorption capacity will largely benefit from the nano-scale dimension of CNC, the high surface area, as well as its chemical-reactive surface. Moreover, it not only heritages all the advantages of using bioproduct such as low cost, natural, abundant etc, but also extremely light. Using a facile surface modification on CNC in the previous work of our lab, the absorption capacity for Methylene Blue dye can already compete with commercial active carbon. My future work will emphasize on studying the detailed mechanism of the absorption between CNC and dye and further improve the absorption efficiency of the modified-CNC.