Amino acid-induced exfoliation of MoS₂ nanosheets through hydrothermal method for the removal of mercury

Contaminants in wastewater, such as heavy metals, have become a serious problem all around the world. Nanotechnology has grown in popularity as an emerging technology, and numerous nanomaterials have been designed to remove heavy metals from polluted water because of their superior properties arising from the nanoscale effect. In this study, we used an amino acid-mediated hydrothermal technique to prepare MoS2 nanosheets with covalent functionalization and were used for removing mercury from aqueous media. Scanning electron microscopy demonstrated that produced MoS2 nanosheets had a petal-like structure. The multilayer adsorption process is implicated by the Freundlich isotherm model, which gives the best match. In this investigation, pseudo-second-order kinetics was identified. The removal efficiency of as-synthesized MoS2 nanosheets in 6hrs is 99.7 %. At room temperature, the adsorbent's highest adsorption capacity was reported to be 498.5 mg/g.