Bis-Catecholamide-Based Materials for Uranium Extraction

This work reports the synthesis of formo-phenolic resins containing four catecholamide (CAM) moieties with admixture of phenol, catechol or resorcinol. These chelating resins have been developed to selectively extract U(VI) from seawater. This media is a challenging environment due to a pH around 8.2 and a large excess of alkaline and earth-alkaline cations. From the various sorption experiments investigated, the results indicate that the synthesized material exhibit good sorbent properties for U(VI) with uptake capacity about 50 mg/g for the more promising resins with a pronounced selectivity for uranium even under saline conditions. Thermodynamic and kinetic adsorption data were determined for the best resin (Langmuir adsorption model and pseudo-second order model).