Enhanced stability and conductivity of montmorillonite and sucrose loaded Fe-MOFs for degradation of chlortetracycline hydrochloride via electrochemically activated persulfate

Ferreous metal-organic frameworks (Fe-MOFs) have provided excellent platforms for the removal of refractory contaminants from water, whereas poor conductivity and intrinsically fragile limit applications in electrochemistry and heterogeneous catalyst, respectively. Hence, we synthesized a novel Fe-based MOFs(Mt@Fe-MOFs@C) obtained through introducing sucrose to improve conductivity and montmorillonite (Mt) to enhance cycling stability, and combined with persulfate (PS) and electrochemical (EC) method to remove chlortetracycline hydrochloride(CTC) from water environment. The electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) demonstrated Mt.@Fe-MOFs@C was more conductive than pure Fe-MOFs. Mt.@Fe-MOFs@C showed high electrocatalytic activity for degradation of CTC in EC/Mt.@Fe-MOFs@C/PS system. The mechanism study indicated that SO4•− and HO• played dominant role in the elimination of CTC. Mt.@Fe-MOFs@C also exhibited excellent reusability with 83% removal efficiency after 5 cycle degradation. This work demonstrated that Mt.@Fe-MOFs@C would have potential for electrochemical wastewater remediation.