The removal of bisphenol A from aqueous solutions by MIL-53(Al) and mesostructured MIL-53(Al)

In this work, metal-organic framework MIL-53(Al){Al(OH)[O2C-C6H4-CO2]} and MIL-53(Al)-F127{Al(OH)[O2C-C6H4-CO2]} were synthesized and used as sorbents to remove bisphenol A (BPA) from aqueous system. The sorption kinetics data of BPA were found to be in agreement with the pseudo-second-order model. The equilibrium sorption amounts of BPA on MIL-53(Al) and MIL-53(Al)-F127 reached 329.2±16.5 and 472.7±23.6 mg g(-1), respectively, far more than that of commercial activated carbons (ranging from 129.6 to 263.1 mg g(-1)). Both MIL-53(Al) and MIL-53(Al)-F127 could remove BPA fast from aqueous solutions, and the required contact time to reach equilibrium was approximately 90 min for MIL-53(Al) and 30 min for MIL-53(Al)-F127, respectively. The optimum pH levels for the removal of BPA using MIL-53 (Al) and MIL-53(Al)-F127 were 4 and 6 separately. The optimum temperature for the sorption behavior of BPA on the two sorbents was 20 °C. The results performed show that the resulting products, as one kind of MOFs, can be regarded as a new class of sorbents for water treatment and could find great applications in the fields of environmental water pollution control and resources reuse.