Desarrollo de materiales híbridos para la eliminación de arsénico de medios acuosos

Resumo

Aquatic environmental pollution constitutes a great risk for living organisms and humans. The search of efficient, economic and environmentally friendly techniques is one of the major challenges for the XXI century. A large number of studies of water pollutants removal using natural materials or agricultural and industrial residues were developed in the last decades. The majority of these studies are focused in sorption processes. In this work the synthesis of new hybrid materials was carried out using natural and low cost materials. The synthesized hybrid materials were used as adsorbents for arsenic removal in water. The study of the synthesis conditions and the structure characterization of the new materials constitute an important part of this dissertation. On the other hand, several studies were developed to evaluate the effect of the physico-chemical parameters in arsenic sorption process. In addition, column sorption studies were carried out in order to assess the viability of the process for industrial applications. Finally, cadmium and 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene removal studies were performed in order to probe the efficiency of some of the hybrid materials for the removal of other pollutants.