Study on the preparation of zirconium hydroxide textile and its absorption and detoxification of chemical warfare agents

Abstract

Chemical warfare agents (CWAs) still threaten society and have been used in recent terrorist attacks. Various adsorbents have been developed to remove CWA droplets effectively from contaminated objects to protect against serious injury. In this project, a collection of textiles, zirconium hydroxide (ZH) combined with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-polyethylene glycol (PEG) or polyacrylonitrile (PAN), were prepared using electro-spinning. Results of scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy indicated that ZH was uniformly distributed and attached in the interstices of the polymer fiber with a high Zr load ratio of >24%. The wetting and absorption of ZH textiles to simulation agents such as 2-chloroethyl ethyl sulfide and dimethyl methylphosphate showed good performance in terms of absorption. The calculation results, where the absorption factor ka of each textile was a constant value, suggested they had excellent capacity of removing CWA droplets, such as bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide (HD), S-2-(diisopropylamino) ethyl O-ethyl methylphosphonothioate (VX) and pinacolyl methylphosphonofluoridate (GD). The detoxification experiment showed that both textiles of ZH@PAN and PAN had optimum degradation of HD with half-lives of 84.5 min due to its fast natural hydrolysis of HD and good adsorption of HD on textile. For degradation of VX solution, ZH@PVA-PEG presented a strong degradation capability with an almost equal half-life of 64.5 min to ZH. ZH@PVA-PEG could also catalyze GD hydrolysis effectively with a half-life of 55.0 min. This work manifested the possibility for quick absorption of CWAs from contaminated objects with non-powder materials and a strong degradation ability.