Removal of Antibiotics from industrial waste water using Functionalized Magnetic Multi-Walled Carbon nanotubes

In the recent years, residual antibiotics are considered to be nascent environmental pollutants due to their continuous input and persistence into the aquatic ecosystem even at low concentrations. Therefore, these are necessary to develop efficient methods for the wastewater treatment[2,3]. The present studied describes the efficiency of magnetic multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MMWCNT) for the sorption of the selected antibiotics ( penicillin and enrofloxacin) from wastewater samples. The functionalized MMWCNT were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The obtained antibiotic percentage of sorption was evaluated by quantitative assessment using high-performance liquid chromatography(HPLC) coupled with the Ultraviolet Detector.To optimize the operating conditions, the effects of pH, Time contact, Agitation speed ,adsorbent dosage, and antibiotics initial concentration were investigated by full factorial experimental design method[1].The sorption data were fitted to the Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin-Radushkevitch (D-R) equation to estabilish the sorption isotherm of antibiotics removal by MMWCNT[4]. The best percentages of retention were obtained for penicillin 95%,and enrofloxacin 86.5% .