Spectroscopic analyses of water hyacinth: FTIR and modeling approaches

Abstract

Water hyacinth has received attention because of its potential to remove pollutants when utilized as a biological filtration system. It could remove several heavy metals as well as some organics. In the present work, water hyacinths from fresh as well as polluted water were collected. FTIR and XRF were utilized to study the structure of water hyacinth collected from different media. Semiemperical quantum mechanical calculations were utilized at PM6 level of theory to simulate the molecular structure of the plant based on the obtained experimental results. Results concluded that, water hyacinth could be described as a composite of cellulose and lignin as well as some metal oxides.