Recycling of uranyl from contaminated water

Many separation processes are related to the behavior of ions close to charged surfaces. In this work, we examine uranyl ions, which can be considered as rod-like molecular ions with a spatially distributed charge, embedded in a system of like charged surfaces. The analysis of the system is based on an approximate field theory which is accurate from the weak to the strong electrostatic coupling regimes. The numerical results show that close to the charged surface the ions are oriented parallel to the surface, whereas at distances greater than half of the ion length, they are randomly oriented. Due to the restriction of the orientational degrees of freedom, the density of ions at the charged surface decreases to zero. For large surface charge densities, the force between like charged surfaces becomes attractive, as a result of charge correlations. The theoretical results are in good agreement with Monte Carlo simulation results.