Sustainable Chloride Removal from Conservation Electrolytes Using Alkali-Activated Carbon Nanofiber-Supported BiOCl in Capacitive Deionization.

Authors

Aoze Li, Fanghui Pan, Liping Sun, Mengying Xu, Ran Zhang, Fei Yu, Jie Ma

Published in

Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland). Volume 16. Issue 15. Jul 24, 2026. Epub Jul 24, 2026.

Abstract

Chloride-induced corrosion is a major threat to excavated bronze artifacts, yet conventional alkaline desalination requires repeated solution replacement and generates secondary chemical waste. Herein, a series of BiOCl-loaded carbon nanofiber composites (CNFs@BiOCl-X) were prepared by KOH activation followed by hydrothermal growth of BiOCl, aiming to develop regenerable electrodes for chloride removal in capacitive deionization systems. Alkali activation regulated the surface roughness, oxygen-containing functional groups, hydrophilicity, and BiOCl loading of CNFs, while the three-dimensional conductive network helped immobilize BiOCl nanostructures and buffer the volume variation associated with reversible Bi/BiOCl conversion. Electrochemical analyses confirmed the pseudocapacitive chloride-storage behavior of the composites, with ion removal governed by the coupled effects of BiOCl redox activity, charge transfer, and interfacial ion transport. In a fixed-electrode membrane capacitive deionization system, CNFs@BiOCl-2 exhibited the best overall performance, delivering a salt adsorption capacity of 100.44 mg g^-1 at 1.4 V and retaining 93.17% of its desalination capacity after 35 cycles at 1.2 V. For flow-electrode capacitive deionization, the higher BiOCl-loading CNFs@BiOCl-5 showed superior utilization of active sites and achieved 94.75% NaCl removal from a 1000 mg L^-1 solution within 3 h, with an average desalination rate of 15.48 μg cm^-2 min^-1 and an energy consumption of 0.88 kWh kg^-1-NaCl. These findings demonstrate that rationally matching BiOCl loading with electrode configuration enables efficient and sustainable chloride management, offering a promising electrochemical strategy for conservation electrolytes and related desalination applications.

PMID:
42584301
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 12 Aug 2026.

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