In the stainless steel pickling process, a large amount of toxic and harmful wastewater are usually produced, including high-concentration nitrate wastewater. The toxic hazard of nitrate wastewater has received extensive attention and become a global problem. However, most of researches focus on low concentration of nitrate pollution in ground or drinking water, the actual high-concentration nitrate wastewater lacks applicable technologies to achieve discharge standards. Electrocatalytic denitrification is regarded as a promising approach to reduce excessive nitrogen oxyanions to benign dinitrogen in polluted water. Developing low-cost, sustainable and high-efficient materials for emerging electrochemical reduction of nitrate contaminant is attracting enormous interest. In this study, novel bimetallic Cu-Co nanocomposites incorporated in porous N-doped carbon nanosheets were synthesized by low-temperature pyrolysis of bimetallic-organic frameworks as electrocatalysts to achieve targeted denitrification. The bimetal ratio was precisely regulated by the MOF framework template and coordination modulation strategy. The optimal CuO/CuCo2O4 nanosheets exhibited high efficiency (~99.92%) for the reduction of nitrate from 2223.28 to 1.71 mg NO3--N L-1, and the total nitrogen degradation rate in wastewater reached 98.9% after electrolysis for 5 h (remaining 23.68 mg TN L-1, far below the stainless steel pickling standards of 35 mg TN L-1). This progress shows that nanocatalysts derived from MOFs are very promising in electrochemical nitrate reduction.

Metal-organic framework-derived carbon-supported N-doped Cu-Co bimetal catalysts for electrochemical nitrate reduction

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ACS Fall 2022

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