The Preparation and Characterization of Expanded Graphite via Microwave Irradiation and Conventional Heating for the Purification of Oil Contaminated Water

Recently, the graphite based materials have gained interest as excellent platforms to remove aqueous pollutants via adsorption routes. This is given that such materials possess large specific surface area and low density. In the present work, a comparative study of two facile and effective approaches is conventional thermal heating and microwave irradiation methods to fabricate expanded graphite from available flake graphite sources of Vietnam for oil-contaminated water purification. The as-prepared expanded graphite was characterized by using FT-IR, SEM, XRD and BET analysis. The results exhibited that expanded graphite has multilevel pore structures and the surface area of expanded graphite obtained from microwave irradiation and conventional heating was 147.5 (m²/g) and 100.97 (m²/g) under optimal processing conditions. The as-synthesized expanded graphite from the microwave irradiation method was found to have higher adsorption capacities for diesel oil, crude oil, and fuel oil compared to conventional heating method.