Studies on heavy metal adsorption using novel synthetic polymers bearing donor atoms

Abstract

The development of the country depends on industrialization and agricultural production. To cater the need of the country, a number of industries have grown up. Any industries process releases some kind of pollutants, which increase the pollution load in all segments of environment, especially in water bodies. Heavy metals are found as pollutant in industrial wastewater streams. Mainly it is originating from chemical manufacturing, painting and coating, extractive metallurgy, mining, nuclear, and other industries. Heavy metals exert a deleterious effect on the flora and fauna of streams and lakes. So the role of chemist and technocrats become even important to reduce the load of pollution. One of the potential remedies to this problem is the use of adsorption technologies. Because of less initial cost, flexibility and simplicity of design ease of operation and insensitivity to toxic pollutants. Numerous conventional methods, such as chemical precipitation, coagulation, solvent extraction, ion-exchange, adsorption, and reverse osmosis, are available for the removal of heavy metal ions from ion-exchanger. Adsorption is considered more effective and less expensive than other techniques. The aim of the present research is to synthesize novel Polyamides bearing pyridyl and azomethine groups (PAP, PAT), Poly[2,5-1,3,4- (thiadiazole)benzalimine] TDIP and Polyurethane bearing phenylthiourea and azomethine groups PU through polycondensation technique. The synthesized polymers are characterized using Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FT-IR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H-NMR and 13C-NMR). Thermal stability of the synthesized polymers were determined using Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA), surface morphology of the synthesized polymers are analysed using Brunauer Emmett Teller Spectroscopy (BET) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM).