ABSTRACT
Environmental pollution, induced by some contaminants, such as organic pollutants and heavy metals from release of industrial production, is of much concern [1-3]. There have been many useful methods and techniques developed for environmental remediation [4-8]. Among them, removal of pollutants based on adsorption of adsorbents is an important and effective way [9]. In this case, the key issue is the high-efcient adsorbents. Fabrication of the adsorbents with high surface activity, high specic surface area, and strong selective adsorption are expected. Although the nanosized particle powders could be candidates for such absorbents, they are very easily aggregated, leading to unwanted reduction in the active surface area. In Chapter 5, we have introduced the hierarchical micro/nanostructured materials, which are composed of microsized objects with nanostructures, and exhibited the signicantly structurally enhanced photocatalytic performances. Similarly, such materials also exhibit signicant enhanced adsorption performance compared with the normally structured ones due to their high specic surface area and structural stability. Therefore, these materials could be the candidates of high-efcient adsorbents for removal of some pollutants, such as heavy metal ions, organic contamination in water (or solutions), due to their easy separation from solution during application in the environmental remediation. Recently, there have been some reports on the removal of pollutants using micro/nanostructured materials as absorbents [8-13]. For instance, Zhong et al. [9] prepared three-dimensional (3D) owerlike iron oxide with micro/nanostructures and used them as absorbents to remove As(V) and Cr(VI) from water. Some new micro/nanostructured adsorbents, such as mesoporous MgO [10], owerlike ceria [11], and hierarchical meso-/macroporous aluminum phosphonate hybrid materials, were fabricated for adsorption of toxic pollutants in water [12]. In this chapter, we discuss the adsorption properties of some special micro/nanostructured materials including the oxide semiconductors [ZnO], magnetic compounds [Fe3O4, FeS/C], composites, and metal silicates, to the organic and heavy metal contaminant, to demonstrate their structurally enhanced adsorption performances, and also to show the possibility and validity of the micro/nanostructured materials as the promising adsorbents for contaminant removal.
