No abstract

With the gradual exhaustion of land mineral resources, oceans and lakes have attracted world attention because they are abundant in inorganic mineral resources including lithium, potassium, rubidium and cesium. Lithium is becoming the key material in manufacturing of primary and secondary batteries used in various portable devices and hybrid/electric vehicles. Rubidium has been widely applied inglobal positioning satellites, magneto‐optic modulators, solid‐state lasers, phosphors, and glass manufacturing. In this work, a novel dual‐functional magnetic ion imprinting polymer (Fe3O4@SiO2@IIPs) powder was prepared using 12‐crown‐4 (12C4) and 18‐crown‐6 (18C6) as functional monomer, and characterized by FT‐IR, elemental analysis, XRD, TGA, SEM and TEM. The adsorption performance of Fe3O4@SiO2@IIPs for simultaneous adsorption of lithium and rubidium from simulative salt lakes was evaluated by batches of experiments at various pH values, contact time, and initial concentrations. Kinetic experiments show that the adsorption process followed the pseudo second order kinetic model. Langmuir adsorption isotherm model and Freundlich adsorption equilibrium data were fitted; the results show that Langmuir isotherm model is more suitable for the adsorption process. Additionally, Fe3O4@SiO2@IIPs exhibit specificity towards Li(I) and Rb(I) and low competitive behavior with Na(I), K(I) and Mg (II). Additionally, the selectivity properties, reusability and adsorption thermodynamic were also investigated. The obtained results show that the prepared Fe3O4@SiO2@IIPs material remains high adsorption capacities after five cycles, exhibits excellent abilities to simultaneously and selectively recover Li+ and Rb+ and have a promising application in the simultaneous adsorption of lithium and rubidium ions.

No abstract

Plastic recycling is an essential tool to address the issue of plastic waste pollution. Unfortunately, current mechanical recycling processes for commingled plastic waste such as waste artificial turf (WAT) are limited by the inherent dilemma of separation challenge, high cost, and low‐quality products. In this work, solid‐phase shear milling (S3M) process was applied to prepare high‐performance WAT/wood flour (WF) composites, which addressed the challenges of poor compatibility and poor mechanical performance. Due to the strong shear force of S3M equipment, the strong hydrogen bonding in WF fibers was broken and the particle size of the WAT/WF mixture decreased from 452 to 47 μm. The well‐dispersed WF significantly improved the mechanical strength of WAT/WF composites from 17.6 to 26.4 MPa and melt processing ability. Moreover, the maximum tensile strength and modulus of the composites further improved to 32.6 and 2477 MPa through solid‐phase stretching with a 4% draw ratio. Compared with traditional WAT/WF composites, our research achieved the enhancement of 85.2% and 81.3% for tensile strength and modulus respectively. This work not only provides a promising strategy to resolve WAT environment pollution but also prepared value‐added high‐performance products for wood‐plastic applications.