Modification and characterization of cellulose cotton fibers for fast extraction of some precious metal ions.

In this work, native cellulose cotton fibers were first modified through graft copolymerization of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and then by insertion of phenyl thiosemicarbazide moieties to finally produce C-PTS chelating fibers, which were fully characterized using various instrumental techniques such as SEM, FTIR, EDX and XRD spectra. The obtained C-PTS were employed in removal and extraction of Au(3+), Pd(2+) and Ag(+) precious metal ions from their aqueous solutions using batch experiments. The kinetic studies showed that the pseudo-second-order model exhibited the best fit for the experimental data. In addition, the adsorption isotherm studies indicated that the adsorption follows the Langmuir model and the maximum adsorption capacities for Au(3+), Pd(2+) and Ag(+) were 198.31, 87.43 and 71.14 mg/g respectively.