Abstract
The fabrication of adsorbent textile fiber materials is of great scientific and industrial interests. In this work a new procedure for fabrication of an anionic compounds adsorbent based on polypropylene nonwoven has been described. Because of using atmospheric pressure plasma as a surface specific pretreatment, the described procedure can be considered as a convenient method without affecting the bulk properties of the fibers. Atmospheric pressure air plasma was used to produce peroxide groups on the surface of polypropylene fibers. Grafting of acrylic acid (AA) was followed to create carboxyl groups on the fibers surfaces and finally the grafted polypropylene fiber samples were aminated using diethylene triamine (DETA) to convert carboxyl groups to amine groups. The effects of various experimental conditions: such as the time for plasma treatment, monomer concentration, temperature and reaction time were investigated. The surface morphology of the fibers was evaluated by SEM. To determine the nitrate and phosphate adsorption on the modified fibers, UV-VIS spectrophotometer was used. Fiber samples modified under optimized conditions showed a high ability to adsorb nitrate and phosphate ions from aqueous media. Keywords: polypropylene, Ion adsorption, Plasma treatment, nitrate, phosphate, acrylic acid