Abstract
The ocean reserves 4.5 billion tons of uranium and amounts to a nearly inexhaustible uranium supply. Biofouling in the ocean is one of the most severe factors that hazard uranium extraction and even cause the failure of uranium extraction. Therefore, development of uranium adsorbents with biofouling resistance is highly urgent. Herein, a strategy for constructing anti‐biofouling adsorbents with enhanced uranium recovery capacity in natural seawater is developed. This strategy can be widely applied to modify currently available carboxyl‐contained adsorbents, including the most popular amidoxime‐based adsorbent and carboxyl metal organic framework adsorbent, using a simple one‐step covalent cross‐link reaction between the antibacterial compound and the adsorbent. The prepared anti‐biofouling adsorbents display broad antibacterial spectrum and show more than 80% inhibition to the growth of marine bacteria. Benefitting from the tight covalent cross‐link, the anti‐biofouling adsorbents show high reusability. The modified amidoxime‐based adsorbents show enhanced uranium recovery capacity both in sterilized and bacteria‐contained simulated seawater. The anti‐biofouling adsorbent Anti‐UiO‐66 constructed in this study exhibits 24.4% increased uranium recovery capacity, with a uranium recovery capacity of 4.62 mg‐U per g‐Ads, after a 30‐day field test in real seawater, suggesting the strategy is a promising approach for constructing adsorbents with enhanced uranium extraction performance.
Highlights
Introduction inexhaustible uranium supplyBiofouling in the ocean is one of the most severe factors that hazard uranium extraction and even cause the failure of uranium extraction
The metal– organic frameworks (MOFs) material UiO-66 was prepared using terephthalic acid (TPA) and isophthalic acid (IPA), in which IPA is essential for the synthesis of the metal organic framework and IPA is responsible for generation of the carboxyl group for uranium recovery
Due to the different features of the materials used in ocean, the dominant biofouling bacteria are different.[19a,c] Though the neomycin used in this study shows a broad antimicrobial spectrum, the constructed anti-biofouling adsorbent cannot inhibit the growth of all marine bacteria because certain of the marine strains are resistant to neomycin
Summary
Neomycin is a widely used aminoglycosides antibiotic that inhibits bacteria by inhibiting the protein synthesis or causing collapse of bacterial cell membrane. The amino group in the aminoglycosides antibiotics is covalently cross-linked with the carboxyl group in the adsorbents. Neomycin contains six amino groups and was chosen for this study (Figure 1). To prepare antibacterial UiO-66, the carboxyl group of the newly synthesized UiO-66 was cross-linked with the amino group of neomycin by addition of N-Hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) and (N1-((ethylimino)methylene)-N3,N3dimethylpropane-1,3-diamine) (EDC) to form a peptide linkage. The results show that the mixture with a ratio of 1:0.03 generated antibacterial UiO-66 with the highest antibacterial activity (Figure S1, Supporting Information). This material was selected for following study, and the newly fabricated adsorbent is referred to as Anti-UiO-66
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