Hylton Kamilah, Chen Yuhong, Mitra Somenath
University of Technology, Jamaica 237 Old Hope Road, Kingston 6, Jamaica W.I.
J Chromatogr A. 2008 Nov 21;1211(1-2):43-8. doi: 10.1016/j.chroma.2008.09.092. Epub 2008 Oct 2.
We demonstrate that functionalized carbon nanotubes can be readily immobilized into the pore structure of a polymeric membrane, which can dramatically improve its performance in analytical scale membrane extraction. This was accomplished by injecting an aqueous dispersion of the nanotubes through a polypropylene hollow fiber under pressure. The nanotubes were trapped and held within the pores and served as sorbents facilitating solute exchange from the donor to the acceptor phase. The effectiveness of this carbon nanotube mediated process was studied by direct solvent enrichment of nonpolar organics, and also by selective extraction of organic acids via a supported liquid membrane. In both cases, the enrichment factor measured as the ratio of concentrations in the acceptor to the donor phases could be increased by more than 200%.
我们证明，功能化碳纳米管可以很容易地固定在聚合物膜的孔结构中，这可以显著提高其在分析规模膜萃取中的性能。这是通过在压力下将纳米管的水分散体注入聚丙烯中空纤维来实现的。纳米管被困在孔内并固定在其中，作为吸附剂促进溶质从供体相到受体相的交换。通过直接溶剂富集非极性有机物以及通过支撑液膜选择性萃取有机酸，研究了这种碳纳米管介导过程的有效性。在这两种情况下，以受体相和供体相浓度之比衡量的富集因子都可以提高200%以上。
