Melamine foam derived nitrogen and boron co-doped metal-free electrode for enhanced electro-fenton degradation of metronidazole

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Chemical Engineering Journal

Volume

455

Publisher

Elsevier

School

School of Engineering

RAS ID

54132

Funders

National Science and Technology Major Project (Grant No. 2016ZX05040003) / Applied Research Project of Qingdao postdoctoral Researchers (qdyy20210090)

Grant Number

qdyy20210090

Comments

Zhao, H., Ma, X., Lu, M., He, F., Lin, F., Zhang, Y., ... & Sun, H. (2023). Melamine foam derived nitrogen and boron co-doped metal-free electrode for enhanced electro-fenton degradation of metronidazole. Chemical Engineering Journal, 455, Article 140593. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2022.140593

Abstract

In this work, a melamine foam derived nitrogen (N) and boron (B) co-doped metal-free electrode was prepared by accessible method and applied in heterogeneous electro-Fenton (EF) system. Overcoming the metal ion leaching and harsh operating conditions of most transition metal electrodes, the prepared metal-free electrode (NB/CF40) possessed an excellent EF performance for degradation of metronidazole (MTZ) in a wide range of pH (3 – 11), maintaining great reusability even after ten runs with higher mineralized current efficiency (MCE) and lower energy consumption (EC). Significantly, the NB/CF40 has excellent decontamination performance for actual wastewater containing MTZ analyzed by quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-Q-TOF-MS) and three-dimensional excitation-emission matrix fluorescence spectra (3D EEMs). According to experimental results, characterization analysis and density functional theory (DFT) calculations, EF reaction mechanism by NB/CF40 cathode was proposed, in which the active sites of B – C – C – C-graphitic N and B – C – C – C-pyridinic N configurations contributed to the improvement of EF performance by affecting the charge density of nearby carbon framework, adsorption of O2, and desorption of *OOH. This work offers a new idea for the remediation of wastewater by the efficient metal-free EF system in a wide pH range.

DOI

10.1016/j.cej.2022.140593

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