The XRD patterns of both Fe-Al (0 min) and Fe-Al (30 min) are depicted in Fig. 1. It can be seen that the Fe-Al (0 min) and Fe-Al (30 min) exhibit symmetric reflections of five major peaks at 2θ values occur, i.e. 11.7°, 23.7°, 34.3°, 39.4° and 46.6°, which are related to the respective (0 0 3), (0 0 6), (0 0 9), (0 1 5) and (0 1 8) planes of typical layered structure [18]. It indicates that the layered double hydroxides materials have been successfully synthesized in our experiments. Compared with the Fe-Al