The literature reports several potential applications of polymers prepared with high internal phase emulsions (HIPEs). However, the evaluation of these materials as supports for antimicrobial agents has not been explored. In this work, silver composites based on polyHIPEs were prepared. Initial studies indicated that these materials can be efficient to prevent biofilm formation. The silver composites were prepared in three steps. First, HIPEs based on styrene-divinylbenzene were polymerized by aqueous suspension polymerization. These particles showed surface areas of 18 and 48 m 2 /g. These polyHIPEs were sulfonated with concentrated sulfuric acid or acetyl sulfate and showed cation exchange capacities of 4.03 and 5.07 meq/g respectively. The sulfonated material was impregnated with silver ions, followed by reduction of the ions to prepare silver composites. These composites showed inhibition halos against E. coli and P. aeruginosa. and did not present adhesion of bacterial cells of K. variicola and S. aureus on their surface.

Hexavalent chromium is a highly toxic environmental inorganic pollutant. To eliminate toxic Cr (VI) ions in natural waters, polymer inclusion membranes (PIMs) have been developed for highly selective metal ion transport applications. The investigation of the effectiveness of Cr (VI) recovery in aqueous solutions using PIMs with varying amounts of plasticizer was studied. The pseudo-first order (PFO) kinetic model was modified to describe the amount of Cr (VI) ions that have accumulated onto the PIMs at a specific time and to evaluate the performance of the PIMs. A quantitative analysis of the modified PFO a model based on their non-linear representation and using the coefficient of determination indicates that the adsorptive properties of the PIMs are best described by the modified non-linear pseudo-first-order kinetic model (R2 > 0.9748), suggesting that the sorption process is physisorption. To show the applicability of the modified model to other transport studies, modified PFO was fitted into the experimental data that studies the transport of Zn (II) ions onto PIM (R2 > 0.95).