Charge balanced anti-adhesive polyacrylamidoxime hydrogel membrane for enhancing uranium extraction from seawater

The extraction of uranium from seawater is vital to meet the increase demands of uranium resource for the nuclear energy industry, while it is severe hazarded by the marine fouling, including both the biofouling and abiotic fouling. Previous reports only focused on the control of biofouling and rare attention is paid to the abiotic fouling. However, the abiotic fouling is the fundamental of the biofouling. Herein, a charged balanced hydrogel adsorbent is fabricated by introducing the charge-positive tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA) into the charge-negative polyacrylamidoxime (PAO). The fabricated PAO-CB hydrogel membrane shows high anti-adhesive ability to the marine fouling, including both the biofouling and abiotic fouling, which is due to the decrease of the charge attraction between the adsorbent and the charged contaminants. Benefitting from the reduce of marine fouling, the PAO-CB hydrogel membrane shows a high uranium extraction capacity of 8.59 mg g−1, which is higher than that of PAO hydrogel membrane by 44.59%. The finding of this study indicates that the construction of charge balanced adsorbent would be an effective strategy to control the complicated marine fouling during uranium extraction from seawater.