removal of mutagen x “mx” from drinking water using reduced graphene oxide coated sand particles

Mutagen x is a hazardous by-product of disinfection by chlorine, which is responsible for most of the mutagenicity in chlorinated drinking water. it has the cancer potency value of 100-fold higher than bromodichloromethane and 6000-fold higher than chloroform, in this study, mutagen x was removed from aqueous media by a thermally reduced graphene oxide bonded on the surface of amino-functionalized sand particles. a box-behnken design was applied to optimize the adsorption process. characterization of the adsorbent and graphene oxide was accomplished using scanning electron microscopy (sem), energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (eds), x-ray powder diffraction (xrd), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ftir), and raman analysis. the effects of three independent parameters, including initial concentration (20–200 μg l−1), temperature (5–30 °c), and adsorbent dose (2–80 g l−1) were examined using batch experiments. characterization results confirmed that the graphene oxide was successfully coated on the surface of sand particles. regression analysis of experimental results showed a great fit with a quadratic polynomial model with the r2 = 0.999. optimum conditions (initial concentration: 20 μg l−1, temperature: 30 °c, and adsorbent dose: 80 g l−1) with the desirability of 1.0 resulted in the minimum residual concentration of mutagen x (2 μg l−1). equilibrium study results depicted that the experimental data were fitted well to the freundlich and ut isotherm models.