Abstract
Porous materials with high specific surface area possess a broad application prospect in the treatment of wastewater. In this work, sulfonated poly(arylene ether nitrile) (SPEN) functionalized with a carboxylic acid group was successfully synthesized, which was subsequently transformed into SPEN porous membranes with cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) as pore-forming agents to study the adsorption performance for lead ions in aqueous solution. Then, experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of pH, contact time and initial solution concentration on the adsorption performance of porous membranes, and the adsorption capacities of porous membranes with different content (0, 5 and 15 wt %) of CTAB were 183.60, 161.73 and 127.43 mg/g, respectively, which manifested that the adsorption capacity decreased with the increase of CTAB. The adsorption capacities of porous membranes increased with the increase of the initial concentration of lead ions, and the maximum reached was 246.96 mg/g. The simulation of adsorption kinetics revealed that the adsorption was accorded with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model and Langmuir equation, indicating that the adsorption process followed Langmuir monolayer adsorption. Thermogravimetric analysis demonstrated that the porous membranes had excellent thermodynamic properties both before and after adsorption. In addition, the change of adsorption peak in the Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) spectrum indicated that the absorption performance of porous membranes for lead ions benefited from the chelation between lead ions and the carboxylic acid group on SPEN. Moreover, the porous membranes maintained excellent adsorption properties after circulating five times under the conditions of acidic or alkaline, and the cycle regeneration effect was outstanding.
Highlights
The rapid development of modern industry brings wealth to society, but it causes damage to the environment at the same time
We studied the effect of surfactant cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) on the adsorption capacity
Experimental results showed that the addition of CTAB decreased the adsorption capacity of
Summary
The rapid development of modern industry brings wealth to society, but it causes damage to the environment at the same time. Poly(arylene ether nitrile) (PEN), as a special engineering material, possesses excellent thermal stability, corrosion resistance and maneuverability on account of its rigid benzene ring structure and adjustable side chain [23,24]. It can be prepared into microspheres, fibers, membranes, etc., owing to the diversity of its preparation processes. SPEN containing carboxylic acid groups in the side chains was synthesized, leading to further fabrication of the porous membrane with different amounts of cationic surfactant cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB). The adsorption capacity for lead ions by porous membranes was higher than that of other literature [27,28,29,30,31,32,33]
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