Interfacial polymerization of trimesoyl chloride with melamine and palygorskite for efficient uranium ions ultra-removal

Remediation of toxic/hazardous substances from wastewaters using cost-effective and influential adsorbents is very expedient outlook for particularly actual applications. With this respect, a novel and efficient adsorbent was successfully synthesized by in situ interfacial polymerization of magnetite loaded-palygorskite clay (PC) with poly(trimesoyl chloride-melamine) (p(TMC-M)). The adsorption performance of the synthesized PC-g-p(TMC-M) in the uptake of hexavalent uranium (U(VI)) ions was investigated in a batch system. The adsorbent was chemically and morphologically characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning electron microscope (SEM)/Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDX) techniques. Factorial design analysis was applied to optimize the experimental parameters involved in U(VI) removal from aqueous solution. The adsorption isotherm was better modeled by non-linear Langmuir model. The PC-g-p(TMC-M) showed excellent removal performance with an adsorption capacity of 275.8 mg.g⁻¹ under the condition of pH 6, 75 min contact time and 20 °C temperature. The pseudo-second-order equation revealed a high correlation (0.992–0.997) obtained at different four temperatures. The regeneration test indicated that PC-g-p(TMC-M) has relatively high adsorption/desorption yield as 82/78% at first 3rd cycle. The thermodynamic examination of the equilibrium data proved that the favorability of U(VI) adsorption process onto PC-g-p(TMC-M) was decreased with increasing temperature from 20 to 50 °C. All results demonstrated that the PC-g-p(TMC-M) has hopeful prospective for elimination of U(VI) ions from aquatic medium.