Experimental study on efficient electrocatalytic reduction of U(VI) at Amine-Amidoxime bifunctional graphite felt electrode

The amidoxime-based material is one of the effective materials for adsorbing uranium. The electrocatalysis can be used as an effective strategy for separating uranium. In this study, conductive graphite felt was used as substrate, amine-amidoxime modified polyacrylonitrile (PAN) graphite felt was prepared by heterogeneous method. With the successful synthesis of the material with bifunctional groups, the bifunctional modified PAN graphite felt (TETA-PAO/GF) had good uranium adsorption performance by the way of electrocatalysis technology. It was characterized by SEM, FT-IR, XPS, XRD, ICP-MS, etc. The adsorption capacity of the electrode material to uranium reached 1 142 mgU·g−1 in unsaturated state in 1 000 mg·L-1 spiked seawater. In real seawater adsorption experiment, 90.08 % uranium was extracted from 16 L seawater. Ultimately, the assessment of the reusability and ion selectivity of TETA-PAO/GF revealed that it has a certain use value for uranium extraction from seawater.