Preparation of imprinted bacterial cellulose aerogel with intelligent modulation of thermal response stimulation for selective adsorption of Gd(III) from wastewater.

Research on recycling of used rare earth elements has been of great interest. Adsorption is one of the advantageous methods to recover gadolinium with high value. In the process of adsorption and separation of gadolinium from materials, the selectivity of materials for gadolinium can be significantly improved by using ion imprinting technique. However, gadolinium elution process is a traditional pickling process, which may affect the construction of imprinting sites. In this study, bacterial cellulose with three-dimensional spatial structure was used as the base material of aerogel material, and functional materials containing a large number of carboxyl groups were introduced by chemical grafting method. In combination with ion imprinting technology and N-polyacrylamide as intelligent temperature control valve, intelligent imprinting aerogel (PNBC-IIPS) with specific selectivity to gadolinium was prepared. The properties of aerogel materials were analyzed by SEM, FT-IR, and BET characterization. The experimental analysis shows that the desorption of gadolinium can be achieved by controlling the temperature change. The adsorption experiments show that PNBC-IIPS can selectively adsorb gadolinium ions from aqueous solution. The maximum adsorption capacity reached 95.51 mg g. Compared with unimprinted aerogel, the maximum adsorption capacity of gadolinium ion is significantly increased, which proves that the introduced ion imprinting technique plays a key role in the adsorption process. Cyclic experiments show that the adsorption capacity of PNBC-IIPS can still maintain 88% of the original adsorption capacity after 5 times of adsorption and desorption. In conclusion, PNBC-IIPS is a green adsorbent for selective recovery of gadolinium ions.