Heavy metals are elements having atomic weights between 63.5 and 200.6 g, and a specific gravity greater than 5 g/cm3[1]. With the rapid development of industries such as metal plating, mining, fertilizers, tanneries, batteries, paper, and pesticides, heavy metal’s wastewaters are increasingly discharged, directly or indirectly, into the environment, especially in developing countries. Unlike organic contaminants, heavy metals are not biodegradable and tend to accumulate in living organisms and many heavy metal ions are known to be toxic or carcinogenic. Toxic heavy metals of particular concern in treatment of industrial wastewaters include zinc, copper, nickel, mercury, cadmium, lead and chromium.
Lead can cause central nervous system damage. It can also damage the kidney, liver and reproductive system, basic cellular processes and brain functions. The toxic symptoms are anemia, insomnia, headache, dizziness, and irritability, weakness of muscles, hallucination and renal damages [2].
Faced with the most stringent regulations, nowadays heavy metals are the environmental priority pollutants and are becoming one of the major problems worldwide. Therefore these toxic heavy metals should be removed from the wastewater to protect the people and the environment. Methods such as chemical precipitation, ion-exchange, membrane filtration, and electrochemical treatment technologies. are being currently used to remove heavy metal ions from waste waters ([3] and references within). The application of the aforementioned methods becomes economically unviable for the removal of heavy metals at lower concentrations [4]. In those cases, adsorptive treatment is appropriate. Adsorption is now recognized as an effective and economic method for heavy metal wastewater treatment. The process offers flexibility in design and operation and in many cases will produce high-quality treated effluent. In addition, because adsorption is sometimes reversible, adsorbents can be regenerated by suitable desorption processes.
A number of materials have been used to remove heavy metals from wastewater. Several recent publications utilized inexpensive naturally-occurring lignocelluloses substrates, e.g. wheat straw, peanut shell, moss peat, bagasse fly ash, tree fern, gram husk, coconut coir pith and saw dust for heavy metal removal [5], [6], [7] and [8]. These substrates were found to have good adsorption capacity due to substances inherently associated with cellulose such as lignin, tannin and pectin, which contain polyphenolic, aliphatic hydroxyl and carboxylic groups. The main disadvantages of these materials are their low resistance to abrasive forces in batch or column applications and leaching of some organics (water extractives) during adsorption [9]. In adsorption processes, adsorbents with high specific surface areas are needed. Small pores, such as micropores and mesopores, result in a large specific surface area responsible for adsorption. Pore size, pore size distribution and specific surface area, as well as pore surface chemistry, are the major factors in the adsorption process [10]. Silica aerogels meet these conditions because they are extremely porous (up to 99%) nanostructure systems with high specific surface areas (500–1000 m2 g−1), low density (as low as 5 kg/m3) and they exhibit high adsorption capacity for the removal of heavy metals from waste waters, which are comparable or even exceed that of commonly used adsorbents[11], [12], [13], [14] and [15]. Furthermore, one of the most important properties of silica aerogels is the possibility to modify their chemical surface with the incorporation of organic functional groups [10]. Though mesoporous silica as sorbents should be more expensive than the use of low-cost natural adsorbents (lignite, coconut waste, wood, activated carbon, etc.), the former offer several advantages making them more attractive.
Because of the unique textural properties, the discovery of hexagonally ordered mesoporous silicas [16] has stimulated a renewed interest in the design of adsorbents and catalysts. The addition of organic groups by grafting organosiloxane precursors onto the surface of the pores results in functional mesoporous hybrid materials [17], [18], [19],[20], [21], [22], [23] and [24]. These organic–inorganic hybrid materials have been reported to exhibit improved sorption properties toward heavy metal ions, superior to those achieved with silica gel functionalized with the same ligand [25] and [26]. Unfortunately, the most extensively investigated mesoporous material MCM-41 silica shows low mechanical and hydrothermal stability. It has been shown that the low hydrothermal stability of MCM-41 material is due to the hydrolysis of its thin (1–2 nm thickness) pore walls [27] and [28]. Zhao et al. [29] developed SBA-15 mesostructured silica, which consists of parallel cylindrical pores with axes arranged in a hexagonal unit cell. SBA-15 usually has wider pores than MCM-41 (SBA-15 pores ra