Coordination and hydrogen bond-coadjusted highly stretchable wet-spun poly(acrylic acid) fiber and its stable activity as Fenton catalyst

Abstract

High stretching is an effective route to attain high performance fiber. Therefore, the stretchability of wet-spun poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) fiber is important for the preparation of high performance PAA fiber by stretching. A combination of coordination and hydrogen bonding was synergistically used to prepare highly stretchable wet-spun PAA fibers, and high stretching was subsequently carried out to induce the production of molecular orientation and fibrillar crystals, which can remarkably enhance the strength of resulting fiber. The breaking strength of stretched fiber reached up to 1.631cN/dtex, increasing by 2813% compared to that of unstretched fiber. Moreover, high stretching was used to thin the resulting fiber and promote the transformation of PAA chains from coiled to extensional conformation, so that the carboxyl groups wrapped by coiled PAA chains were exposed to the environment. When the highly stretched fiber was used to decolorize methylene blue (MB) aqueous solution, the exposed carboxyl groups can quickly re-coordinate with the iron ions eluted by MB aqueous solution to minimize the loss of iron ions. The measurement results showed that the average concentration of eluted iron ions was only 3.20 mg/L during 40 operation cycles for the highly stretched fiber, decreasing by 64.0% compared to that of unstretched fiber. Due to low iron ion leaching-out, the highly stretched fiber showed superstable activity in catalyzing H2O2 to oxidatively decolorize MB. The research results revealed that the obtained fiber can decolorize more than 90% MB within 3 min during 40 cycles without showing any obvious attenuation in decolorization efficiency and decolorization rate. In this case, the Fenton catalysts reported by literature are scarcely comparable to the prepared fiber in many aspects. Therefore, the fiber prepared in this work can be expected to show great potential for application in the field of dye wastewater treatment.