INTERACTIONFullerene/polymer composites are promising materials for various fields of industry, medicine, and pharmacology. This is owing to the fact that modifica tion of polymers with carbon nanoparticles improves their physicochemical properties, such as conductive, optical, mechanical, and catalytic characteristics, and promotes the occurrence of new properties, e.g., bio logical activity [1].Various forms of fullerene (C 60 , C 70 , fullerene nan otubes, fullerene soot) exhibit adsorption activity to organic solvents [2, 3] and metal ions [4]. This prop erty of nanoparticles is used in modification of the sur face of inorganic materials with the purpose of increasing their surface activity [5,6].At present, there are publications devoted to func tionalization of synthetic polymers with fullerene by various methods [7][8][9]. Among other polymers, poly styrene is of interest, since it, being an electron donor polymer macromolecule, forms a noncovalent link with an electron acceptor molecule of C 60 during its functionalization with fullerene in solutions of aro matic hydrocarbons [8]. The modification of polysty rene with fullerene may be suggested to lead to an increase in the specific surface of the produced films and to an enhancement in the sorption activity of the composites. Moreover, styrene/divinylbenzene copol ymers are raw materials for commercial manufactur ing cationites and the development of sorbent based on polystyrene modified with carbon nanoclusters may allow significant extension of the choice of sor bents. For quantitative assessment of how the proper ties of the polymer surface alter after modification, its adsorption characteristics can be used.In this connection, the purpose of the present work is to investigate the effect of modification of polysty rene with fullerene on its sorption properties with respect to heavy metal ions.
EXPERIMENTALAs an object in this work, we selected atactic poly styrene with М 1 × 10 5 . Fullerene, C 60 , containing 95.5% of the main material was purchased from Fullerene Technologies, St. Petersburg. The modifi cation of polystyrene with carbon nanoparticles was performed in the following way: the weighed samples of polymer and fullerene (C 60 ) were separately dis solved in o xylene; then, their solutions were mixed in needed proportions. The fraction of C 60 in the com posite was varied from 0.01 to 0.1 wt %. The films were obtained by spreading a polymer solution over a glass substrate and holding it until complete evaporation of the solvent. The films obtained were transparent 70 µm in thickness and had a sufficient mechanical strength. The modified polystyrene film was of light violet color, whose intensity depended on the concen tration of fullerene in the composite. The sorption properties of polystyrene and modified polystyrene films with respect to Cu(II), Ni(II), Zn(II), and Cd(II) were studied under the static mode at 293 K. The kinetics of sorption of heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions of their sulfates on the initial and modified polystyre...