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Designing high-performance ceramic adsorbent with a wide spectrum of properties such as regulatable pore structure, high surface area, ultrahigh organic dye removal efficiency and renewability in an affordable and rational approach is vital for real-life applications. However, integrating all these individual functionalities simultaneously into one bulky material is still challenging. Herein, hierarchical porous ceramic adsorbents with nanofibrous-granular composite structure were proposed via colloidal co-assembly of coal-containing kaolin waste and silicon to resolve the above conflicting demands. Such structure endows the resultant products with satisfactory surface area of 52 m2 g−1, ultrahigh malachite green removal efficiency of 97.6%, outstanding adsorption capacity of 97.6 mg/g, excellent renewability after calcining at 500 °C. Such ceramic adsorbent provides a sustainable and feasible strategy for fabricating water purification materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing high-performance air filters for high-temperature particulate matter (PM) removal is of great importance but remains challenging. Here we demonstrate the ceramic foam-based filters via polyurethane (PU) foaming using diatomite and kaolin powder as the starting materials. Diatomite was grafted by dodecanedioic acid (DA) to improve the dispersity in the PU slurry. The calcined products demonstrated a hierarchical pore structure with multiple well-controlled micron-sized window pores on the cell wall of the sub-micron bubble. The resulting products exhibited a high removal efficiency (96.3%) at a pressure drop of 33 Pa. This research showed that as-prepared ceramic foams can be potentially used as new high-temperature filters for high-temperature PM removal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]