Development and Characterization of Polypyrrole-Based Nanocomposite Adsorbent and Its Applications in Removal of Radioactive Materials

Abstract

Development of environmental friendly materials is desirable in the fields of science and engineering for various purposes. In environmental science, they find applications commonly in environmental remediation and the recovery of valuable metals. This aspect is of particular concern to health sciences due to the toxic effects and non-biodegradable nature of many substances that have found their way into the human body via environmental media. As for instance, though cobalt possesses some importance in diet it has been linked to health problems like cardiomyopathy, asthma etc. via overexposure. As a result, removal of this substance from the aqueous media of our environment is crucial. In this study, polypyrrole conducting polymer incorporated with biomass waste (sawdust) was prepared by simple chemical oxidative polymerization as a composite adsorbent for ⁵⁷Co radionuclide removal from aqueous solution. The as-prepared composite material was characterized by FESEM, XRD and BET surface analysis. In the ⁵⁷Co adsorption studies, the effects of several factors such as adsorbent dosage, contact time and competitive metal ions were investigated for real wastewater treatment applications. The results indicated that the removal process was rapid and reached saturation within 3 hours of contact of adsorbent and adsorbate at ambient temperature. Both Na⁺ and K⁺ coexisting ions were found to affect ⁵⁷Co adsorption and the uptake percentage was reduced from 54.9 to ~ 20% at 0.1M of both Na⁺ and K⁺ ions. Langmuir isotherm model was used to fit the maximum sorption capacity.