Adsorption and separation properties of gallic acid imprinted polymers prepared using supercritical fluid technology

Abstract

Molecularly imprinted technique is one of the methods to form specific memory sites in a polymer matrix with the template. For main objective of this work, we prepared molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) using supercritical fluid technique as an eco-friendly process. MIPs were synthesized using methyl methacrylate (MMA) as a third monomer, methacrylic acid (MAA) as a functional monomer, gallic acid (GA) as a template, and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) as a crosslinking agent. The template was removed through the method of Soxhlet extraction, and the removal ratio was about 95–99%. The adsorption abilities of prepared MIPs was evaluated by binding kinetics, the binding isotherms, Scatchard analysis, the adsorption of materials with structures similar to templates, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis, and the selectivity factor (a), The results of the evaluation indicate that the prepared MIPs have high separation abilities and selectivity. In addition, we identified that although there was a difference of adsorption quantities with the crosslinking agent contents (EGDMA contents), MIPs synthesized in this study had good adsorption selectivity in the presence of GA and its structure analogue materials. From this result, it could be found that the selectivity of MIPs was improved significantly by controlling the crosslinking agent.