Biosorption of uranyl ions from aqueous solutions by soluble renewable polysaccharides

Polysaccharides derived from natural sources have been offered as environment friendly sorbents for the adsorption of heavy metals. We present a simple technique to remove uranyl ions from aqueous solutions by using representative polysaccharides. The adsorption efficiency of UO₂²⁺ decreased in the following order: xanthan gum > kappa > iota/guar gum, for instance, the efficiencies after sorption of 30 min with 500 mg per L uranyl acetate and 0.03 g of the corresponding polysaccharide were: 89.7%, 85.2%, 79.1% and 77.1%. Lowering the acidity in the system decreased the sorption efficiency with all the polysaccharides, and reducing the ratio between the amount of uranyl ions and the amount of polysaccharide increased the sorption efficiencies, e.g., using 500 mg per L uranyl acetate and 0.05 g of the corresponding polysaccharide (xanthan gum, kappa, iota, guar gum) yielded after 30 min sorption efficiencies of 94.3%, 91.5%, 89.0% and 87.7%, respectively. FTIR, SEM-EDS and TGA analyses verified the presence of uranium in the polysaccharides and showed that the uranyl ions were interacting with the different functional groups. Moreover, the addition of uranyl ions to the polysaccharides caused a sharp decrease in viscometry measurements. In addition, the measurements showed that the addition of uranyl lowered both modules, G' and G'', and made the solution more liquid.