High removal efficiency of methyl orange dye by pure and (Cu, N) doped TiO2/polyaniline nanocomposites

Abstract

Pure polyaniline and pure and copper, nitrogen-doped TiO2/Polyaniline nanocomposites have been successfully synthesized by in-situ oxidative of aniline in aqueous media containing pure or doped TiO2 nanoparticles. The as-prepared materials were characterized by TGA, XRD, FT-IR, BET, and TEM. The samples obtained have been utilized as an adsorbent to remove methyl orange from an aqueous solution. The effect of particular significant parameters such as pH, initial dye concentration, and contact time on the elimination efficiency was examined in batch experiments. The equilibrium sorption data on Ti/PANI composite were matched into Langmuir, Freundlich, and Temkin isotherms, and their parameters were fixed of the three adsorption isotherms. It is found that the R2 value of the Langmuir isotherm model was the highest, with maximum removal of 94% was obtained at a pH of 7 for an adsorbent dose of 0.1 g/100 mL. The kinetic data corresponded to several models and closely followed the pseudo-second-order model for both components. Results obtained indicate that PANI and its TiO2 or (Cu or N)TiO2/polyaniline nanocomposites could be used as an effective adsorbent significantly more than the PANI powder for dye deletion from water.