@article{d827c1abc2b440c08708dbb41a04694f,
title = "Electrosorption, Desorption, and Oxidation of Perfluoroalkyl Carboxylic Acids (PFCAs) via MXene-Based Electrocatalytic Membranes",
abstract = "MXenes exhibit excellent conductivity, tunable surface chemistry, and high surface area. Particularly, the surface reactivity of MXenes strongly depends on surface exposed atoms or terminated groups. This study examines three types of MXenes with oxygen, fluorine, and chlorine as respective terminal atoms and evaluates their electrosorption, desorption, and oxidative properties. Two perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCAs), perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) are used as model persistent micropollutants for the tests. The experimental results reveal that O-terminated MXene achieves a significantly higher adsorption capacity of 215.9 mg·g-1 and an oxidation rate constant of 3.9 × 10-2 min-1 for PFOA compared to those with F and Cl terminations. Electrochemical oxidation of the two PFCAs (1 ppm) with an applied potential of +6 V in a 0.1 M Na2SO4 solution yields >99% removal in 3 h. Moreover, PFOA degrades about 20% faster than PFBA on O-terminated MXene. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the O-terminated MXene surface yielded the highest PFOA and PFBA adsorption energy and the most favorable degradation pathway, suggesting the high potential of MXenes as highly reactive and adsorptive electrocatalysts for environmental remediation.",
keywords = "DFT, MXene membrane, PFOA and PFBA, electrosorption, oxidation",
author = "Qingquan Ma and Jianan Gao and Botamina Moussa and Joshua Young and Mengqiang Zhao and Wen Zhang",
note = "Funding Information: The study was financially supported by the NSF-PFI and the INTERN program (Award number: 2016472) and the 2021-2023 NJIT-BGU Seed Grants. J.Y., B.M., and M.Q.Z. acknowledge the support from NJIT Startup Funds. Calculations were performed on the New Jersey Institute of Technology supercomputing clusters (Lochness) and the Carbon cluster at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (Argonne National Laboratory) using allocations CNM 79443 and CNM 77374. Work performed at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, was supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. Funding Information: The study was financially supported by the NSF-PFI and the INTERN program (Award number: 2016472) and the 2021–2023 NJIT-BGU Seed Grants. J.Y., B.M., and M.Q.Z. acknowledge the support from NJIT Startup Funds. Calculations were performed on the New Jersey Institute of Technology supercomputing clusters (Lochness) and the Carbon cluster at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (Argonne National Laboratory) using allocations CNM 79443 and CNM 77374. Work performed at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, was supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 American Chemical Society.",
year = "2023",
month = jun,
day = "21",
doi = "10.1021/acsami.3c03991",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "15",
pages = "29149--29159",
journal = "ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces",
issn = "1944-8244",
publisher = "American Chemical Society",
number = "24",
}