Development of cotton based adsorbent for the treatment of industrial waste waters

Parajuli, D.; Hirota, Koichi; Seko, Noriaki; Oto, Keisuke*

Cotton consisting of nearly 100% cellulose is one of the widely available natural polymers with versatile applications. In order to know the possibility of using cellulosic materials for the development of functional adsorbents by radiation induced vinyl graft modification method, cotton was studied as a representative natural material. In the present study, cotton was pre-irradiated with electron beam and glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) was grafted onto it. Various parameters like irradiation dose, solvent system, monomer concentration, grafting time, etc were studied to achieve the optimum graft yield. Once GMA containing reactive epoxy group was grafted onto the cotton matrix, various functional groups possessing different selectivity behavior for different metals were introduced by simple chemical reaction. The newly developed functional-cotton derivatives were studied for their ion exchange performances and selectivity patterns mainly for palladium in HCl and HCl-HNO systems.