Flocculants are crucial agents in wastewater treatment because they can remove oppositely charged impurities effectively and swiftly. However, flocculation also inevitably causes secondary contamination due to the residual properties, nonreusability, and nondegradability of traditional flocculant molecules. Herein, an ecofriendly starch-based flocculant, i.e., 2,4-bis(dimethylamino)-[1,3,5]-triazine-6-starch, was synthesized via a preactivation-etherification strategy. The large molecular weight property of the flocculant produced by this method enhances the intermolecular hydrophobic association, achieving complete phase separation of all flocculant molecules from water and residue-free flocculation for the first time. Importantly, a large molecular weight tertiary amine starch-based flocculant (LMTS) exhibits a remarkable flocculation capacity of over 1800 mg·g–1 for dye wastewater, which is significantly higher than that of traditional polyacrylamide and polyaluminum chloride flocculants. Furthermore, the LMTS flocculant could be recycled by pH adjustment, and its structural stability ensured sustained reusability. This high-performance residue-free biomass-based flocculant offers a green advance for wastewater treatment.
In recent years, the light source for photopolymerization technology is evolving from energy-hungry mercury lamps to the safer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and it is urgent to develop new photoinitiator adapted to the photopolymerization system with LED light source. Some acyldiphenylphosphine oxide photoinitiators have been designed and developed for LED light source, but their application is severely limited in the fields of food packing, medical equipment, environmentally-friendly product etc. due to their high mobility in photocured polymers. In this study, eight acyldiphenylphosphine oxide molecules (DAPO-1 ∼ DAPO-8) were synthesized by introducing large molecular weight groups and their UV–visible absorption, photodegradation quantum yield, photopolymerization properties, mobility and solubility in monomer were determined. Thereinto, photoinitiators show lower mobility than TPO, the photoinitiator commonly used in industry, as well as good solubility in monomers and excellent photopolymerization performance. Therefore, they can serve as potential substitutes for commercial TPO, especially in the application of low-migration photocurable system.