Facile fabrication of snowman-like magnetic molecularly imprinted polymer microspheres for bisphenol A via one-step Pickering emulsion polymerization

Abstract

In this paper, the magnetic molecularly imprinted polymers (M-MIPs) for bisphenol A were synthesized via facile one-step Pickering emulsion polymerization using Fe3O4 nanoparticles as the only stabilizer. The synthesis was based on non-covalent molecular imprinting strategy and performed by thermally initiated radical polymerization. The morphology of M-MIPs microspheres was examined by the field emission scanning electron microscope. The result indicated that most of prepared M-MIPs microspheres appeared snowman-like shape instead of the regular spherical form. The binding performance of M-MIPs microspheres was researched through a batch of binding tests including binding kinetics and binding isotherm. M-MIPs could reach binding equilibrium within 60 min. The binding capacity of M-MIPs (16.20 μmol g−1) was higher than that of magnetic non-imprinted polymers (M-NIPs), whose binding capacity was 9.44 μmol g−1. The specific binding was also carried out with BPA and its structurally similar compounds. The result showed that the M-MIPs possessed high selectivity towards BPA with the imprinting factor of 1.69. The M-MIPs may be useful in the environmental and analytic fields.