Abstract
Ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) is used as a crosslinker in poly(acrylonitrile (AN)-co-vinylbenzyl chloride (VBC)) to investigate the effect of long-chain crosslinker to the porosity of the terpolymer system. Poly(AN-co-EGDMA-co-VBC) is synthesized by using precipitation polymerization method and further hypercrosslinked by Friedel-Crafts reaction. FT-IR spectra of poly(AN-co-EGDMA-co-VBC) show that the absorption bands at ~1290 cm−1 that are assigned to the C–Cl vibrations are almost disappeared in hypercrosslinked (HXL) poly(AN-co-EGDMA-co-VBC) polymers, confirming that the hypercrosslinking reaction is successful. SEM images show that the morphologies of the polymers are retained through the hypercrosslinking reactions. Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) analysis shows that hypercrosslinked polymers had a specific surface area up to 59 m2·g−1. The preliminary performance of the terpolymer adsorbent to capture polar analyte is evaluated by adsorbing salicylic acid and mefenamic acid from aqueous solution in a batch system. The maximum adsorption capacity of salicylic acid and mefenamic acid were up to 416.7 mg·g−1 and 625 mg·g−1, respectively, and the adsorption kinetic data obeyed pseudo-second-order rate equation.
Highlights
The presence of pharmaceuticals in water resources has raised concerns among researchers worldwide due to their ecotoxicological effects on human and aquatic life [1]
The lower yield of poly(AN-co-Ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA)-co-vinylbenzyl chloride (VBC)) 25/70/5 compared to poly(AN-co-EGDMA-co-VBC) 20/75/5 might be due to the higher amount of AN introduced into the terpolymer system
The observation from the yield of polymerization shows that the presence of EGDMA helps in stabilizing the chain growth during polymerization that results in higher yield
Summary
The presence of pharmaceuticals in water resources has raised concerns among researchers worldwide due to their ecotoxicological effects on human and aquatic life [1]. Allyl glycidyl ether/iminodiacetic acid-co-N,N-dimethylacrylamide grafted to silica gel prepared by Sadeghi and his group were utilized as adsorbents for the removal of mefenamic acid and the maximum adsorption capacity measured was only 7.0 mg·g−1 [8]. It has been reported that high maximum adsorption capacity of salicylic acid was obtained (up to 621 mg·g−1 ) by utilizing the hypercrosslinked resins as the adsorbents [15,19,20]. High adsorption capacity of diclofenac (up to 383.6 mg·g−1 ) using hypercrosslinked poly(acrylonitrile (AN)-co-divinylbenzene (DVB)-co-vinylbenzyl chloride (VBC)). As adsorbents to remove diclofenac was reported by Subri et al [14] Yu and his team reported the adsorption of p-aminobenzoic acid (pharmaceutical intermediates) by modified hypercrosslinked chloromethylated styrene/divinylbenzene with the maximum adsorption capacity of 300 mg·g−1 [23].
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