Immobilization of polyethylenimine nanoclusters onto a cation exchange resin through self-crosslinking for selective Cu(II) removal

Donnan membrane principle provides great opportunities for development of highly efficient adsorbents for toxic metals abatement. Based on the principle we prepared a new composite adsorbent by immobilizing polyethylenimine (PEI) nanoclusters within a macroporous cation exchanger D001 through self-crosslinking by glutaraldehyde upon Cu(II)-template process. Negligible PEI loss was observed from the resultant composite adsorbent D001-PEI-GA to solution of pHs 1–12. Increasing solution pH from 1 to 6 results in more favorable Cu(II) retention by D001-PEI-GA, and Cu(II) adsorption onto D001-PEI-GA follows the pseudo-second-order kinetic model well. Compared to D001, D001-PEI-GA displays more preferable Cu(II) sequestration in the presence of co-ions Mg2+, Ca2+, Sr2+ at higher levels. Fixed-bed adsorption of a synthetic solution containing Cu(II) and other co-ions showed that Cu(II) sequestration on D001-PEI-GA could result in its conspicuous decrease from 5 mg/L to below 0.01 mg/L with the treatment volume as high as 630 BV per run, while that for D001 was only ∼85 BV. Also, the spent composite adsorbent can be readily regenerated by HCl (0.3 M)–NaCl (0.5 M) binary solution for repeated use with negligible capacity loss.