Porous carbon material derived from fungal hyphae and its application for the removal of dye

In this work, fungal hyphae (FH, Irpex lacteus) was used as the carbon resource for the preparation of porous carbon materials (PCFH) using mixed alkali as the activator. The SEM, N2 adsorption/desorption, FT-IR, XRD, Raman, and XPS were used to characterize the structure and surface properties of PCFH. The results showed that the PCFH not only has a huge Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area (2480 m2 g−1), but also has abundant functional groups containing carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Rhodamine B (RhB) was selected to evaluate the adsorption properties of the PCFH prepared under different conditions in dyeing wastewater. A fast adsorption rate was observed, and an uptake capacity of 765 mg g−1 was achieved in the initial 5 min. The maximum adsorption capacity of PCFH to RhB reached 1912 mg g−1 at the pH value of 9, which could efficiently remove RhB from the aqueous solution. The adsorption process was fitted better by a pseudo-second order model, and the adsorption isotherm for the RhB was well fitted by the Freundlich model. Moreover, the probable mechanism of adsorption was analyzed. In short, the good adsorption performance of PCFH indicated that it has a broad application prospect for dye water pollution control.