Abstract
Chemical warfare agents (CWAs) have become a pivotal concern for the global community and spurred a wide spectrum of research for the development of new generation protective materials. Herein, a highly effective self-detoxifying filter consisting of in-situ immobilized Zirconium hydroxide [Zr(OH)4] over woven activated carbon fabric [Zr(OH)4@W-ACF] is presented for the removal of CWAs. It was prepared to harness the synergistic effect of high surface area of W-ACF, leads to high dispersion of CWAs and high phosphilicity and reactivity of [Zr(OH)4]. The synthesized materials were characterized by ATR-FTIR, EDX, SEM, TEM, XPS, TGA, and BET surface area analyzer. The kinetics of in-situ degradation of CWAs over Zr(OH)4@W-ACF were studied and found to be following the first-order reaction kinetics. The rate constant was found to be 0.244 min−1 and 2.31 × 10−2 min−1 for sarin and soman, respectively over Zr(OH)4@W-ACF. The potential practical applicability of this work was established by fabricating Zr(OH)4@W-ACF as reactive adsorbent layer for protective suit, and found to be meeting the specified criteria in terms of air permeability, tearing strength and nerve agent permeation as per TOP-08-2-501A:2013 and IS-17380:2020. The degradation products of CWAs were analyzed with NMR and GC–MS. The combined properties of dual functional textile with reactive material are expected to open up new exciting avenues in the field of CWAs protective clothing and thus find diverse application in defence and environmental sector.
Highlights
The new innovative developments in science and technology and sophistication of equipment for delivery make the chemical warfare agents (CWAs) as a most vulnerable threat for military and civilians both from terrorist groups as well as by sovereign states inspite of the presence of a well established Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) international treaty[1,2,3,4]
These adsorbent materials are still being used in the development of protective ensemble in particular for Chemical warfare agents (CWAs), plethora of materials have been explored as an adsorbent to overcome the CWAs detrimental effects and allow the first responder to be effective with least amount of deterioration in operational performance, such as inorganic materials, activated carbon fabric (ACF)17, zeolites[2, 18], porous c lay[19], silica gels[20], activated carbon[21,22], and metal organic frameworks (MOF)[23,24,25,26]
Thermal gravimetric analyses (TGA) of ACF and Zr(OH)4@Woven activated carbon fabrics (W-ACF) were performed to see the thermal stability of Zr(OH)4@W-ACF and its control samples, were measured from 40 to 800 °C with a 10 °C min-1 ramp under N2 atmosphere (Fig. 1)
Summary
The new innovative developments in science and technology and sophistication of equipment for delivery make the chemical warfare agents (CWAs) as a most vulnerable threat for military and civilians both from terrorist groups as well as by sovereign states inspite of the presence of a well established Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) international treaty[1,2,3,4]. Control samples exhibited only 11% and 20% degradation for CWAs sarin and soman, respectively highlighting the necessity of Zr(OH)4@W-ACF for the unique interaction between electronically rich phosphate group (Lewis base) of CWAs and electron deficient zirconium cation (Lewis acid) of the Zr(OH)4@WACF.
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