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The widespread industrial application of commercial activated carbon for wastewater remediation is constrained by the prohibitive operational costs. To overcome this economic barrier, this study proposes a sustainable valorization strategy for corncob, an abundant agricultural residue, by engineering a low-cost, high-performance cellulose-based adsorbent (CBA). High-purity cellulose was efficiently fractionated from corncobs (yield: 88.95%) utilizing a hydrogen peroxide-assisted formic acid organosolv process under optimized conditions (30 wt % H 2 O 2, 70 °C, 4 h). The extracted cellulose was subsequently converted to porous carbon via phosphoric acid activation. Structural characterization revealed that the optimized CBA possesses a well-developed mesoporous architecture with a high specific surface area of 1079.995 m 2 ·g –1 . The adsorption behaviors were best described by the Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetic models, suggesting a monolayer chemisorption mechanism driven primarily by electrostatic interactions. Remarkably, CBA exhibited an exceptional maximum adsorption capacity ( Q max ) of 509.10 mg·g –1 for Methylene Blue at pH 9. Furthermore, thermodynamic analysis confirmed the spontaneous nature of the process, and the adsorbent retained approximately 80% of its initial capacity after five regeneration cycles. This work provides a viable pathway for the upcycling of lignocellulosic waste into value-added functional materials for environmental applications.
Chen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.