Honciuc Andrei, Solonaru Ana-Maria, Honciuc Mirela
"Petru Poni" Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Gr. Ghica Voda Alley 41A, 700487 Iasi, Romania.
Nanomaterials (Basel). 2023 Sep 22;13(19):2619. doi: 10.3390/nano13192619.
Innovative materials and technologies capable of extraction and recovery of technologically relevant metal ions from various water sources, such as lakes, oceans, ponds, or wastewater reservoirs, are in great demand. Polymer beads are among the most well-known solid-phase adsorbents and ion exchangers employed in metal ion recovery. On the other hand, hydrogels are an emerging platform for producing innovative adsorbents, which are environmentally friendly and biocompatible materials. In this work, we take advantage of both technologies and produce a new type of material by loading nanostructured polymer microsphere adsorbent into a PVA matrix to obtain a hydrogel polymer microsphere (HPM) composite in the form of a block. The main role of the poly(4-vinylpyrridine-co-methacrylic acid) microspheres is to adsorb metal ions, such as Cu(II), from model water samples. The secondary role of these microspheres in the hydrogel is to change the hydrogel morphology by softening it and stabilizing it under a foam-like morphology. The foam-like morphology endows these composites with the capability of floating on water surfaces. In this work, we report, for the first time, an HPM composite capable of floating on water surfaces and extracting Cu(II) ions from model water samples. This could enable more environmentally friendly hydrological mining technologies by simply deploying adsorbents on water surfaces for metal ion extraction and recovery, thus eliminating the need for water pumping and mechanical processing steps.
能够从各种水源（如湖泊、海洋、池塘或废水蓄水池）中提取和回收具有技术相关性的金属离子的创新材料和技术需求巨大。聚合物珠粒是金属离子回收中最著名的固相吸附剂和离子交换剂之一。另一方面，水凝胶是一种新兴的用于生产创新吸附剂的平台，它是环境友好且生物相容的材料。在这项工作中，我们利用这两种技术，通过将纳米结构的聚合物微球吸附剂负载到聚乙烯醇（PVA）基质中，制备出一种新型材料，以块状形式获得水凝胶聚合物微球（HPM）复合材料。聚（4 - 乙烯基吡啶 - 共 - 甲基丙烯酸）微球的主要作用是从模拟水样中吸附金属离子，如Cu(II)。这些微球在水凝胶中的次要作用是通过软化水凝胶并使其在泡沫状形态下稳定来改变水凝胶的形态。泡沫状形态使这些复合材料具有漂浮在水面上的能力。在这项工作中，我们首次报道了一种能够漂浮在水面上并从模拟水样中提取Cu(II)离子的HPM复合材料。这可以通过简单地将吸附剂部署在水面上进行金属离子提取和回收，从而实现更环保的水文采矿技术，进而消除抽水和机械加工步骤的需求。
