Development of high quality Fe3O4/rGO composited electrode for low energy water treatment

Electrochemical water treatment is an attractive technology for water desalination and softening due to its low energy consumption. Especially, capacitive Deionization (CDI) is promising as a future technology for water treatment. Graphene (rGO) has been intensively studied for CDI electrode because of its advantages such as excellent electrical conductivity and high specific surface area. However, its 2D dimensional structure with small specific capacitance, high resistance between layers and hydrophobicity degrades ion adsorption efficiency. In this work, we successfully prepared uniformly dispersed Fe3O4/rGO nanocomposite by simple thermal reactions and applied it as effective electrodes for CDI. Iron oxides play a role in uniting graphene sheets, and specific capacitance and wettability of electrodes are improved significantly; hence CDI performances are enhanced. The hardness removal of Fe3O4/rGO nanocomposite electrodes can reach 4.3 mg/g at applied voltage of 1.5 V, which is 3 times higher than that of separate rGO electrodes. Thus this material is a promising candidate for water softening technology. (C) 2016 Science Press and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics. All rights reserved.