Amidoxime-Functionalized Macroporous Carbon Self-Refreshed Electrode Materials for Rapid and High-Capacity Removal of Heavy Metal from Water

Heavy metal pollution continues to be one of the most serious environmental problems which has attracted major global concern. Here, a rapid, high-capacity, yet economical strategy for deep cleaning of heavy metals ions in water is reported based on amidoxime-functionalized macroporous carbon electrode materials. The active sites of our material can be self-refreshed during the electrochemical removal process, which is different from traditional methods. The novel filter device in this work can purify contaminated water very rapidly (3000 L h -1 m -2 ), and can decrease heavy metal ion concentrations to below 5 ppb with a very short contact time (only 3 s). The original treatment efficiency of the device can be retained even after 1 week of continuous device operation. An extremely high removal capacity of over 2300 mg g -1 can be achieved with 2-3 orders of magnitude higher efficiency than that of surface adsorption-based commercial filters without any decay. Additionally, the cost of energy consumed in our method is lower than $6.67 × 10 -3 per ton of wastewater. We envision that this approach can be routinely applied for the rapid, efficient, and thorough removal of heavy metals from both point-of-use water and industrial wastewater.