Removing heavy metals from wastewater using graphene oxide

Heavy metals in wastewater can cause serious environmental problems and could beharmful to the human body. Therefore, heavy metals need to be removed from thewastewater. Coagulation based methods are popularly used nowadays with provedeffects. New methods such as the application of nanomaterials have brought morepossibilities to increase the removal effects for certain heavy metals. Among thesenanomaterials, graphene oxide has gained a lot of interest because of its large surfacearea and unique structure. Moreover, graphene oxide is an environmentally friendlymaterial. However, most of the reported studies did not use real wastewater samplesbut simulated ones prepared in labs. Therefore, the removal effects need to beexperimentally evidenced by using real wastewater samples. In this project, I studiedthe removal effects of pristine and modified graphene oxide using wastewatercollected at the wastewater treatment plant in Sundsvall (Fillan wastewater treatmentplant). Moreover, I have also studied the heavy metal removal effects of combinedcoagulation method and graphene oxide. Results have shown that graphene oxide hassimilar removal effects to the coagulation method, indicating the enormous potentialof graphene oxide in wastewater treatment.2021-09-19