Fabrication and Characterization of Anisotropic Porous Poly(styrene@acrylic acid) Monolith for Enhanced Ability of Heavy Metal Adsorption

Creating anisotropic interconnected macropores is an efficient way to improve the adsorption ability of adsorbents in terms of fast adsorption, high separation resolution, and high flow hydrodynamics. In this work, a kind of poly(styrene@acrylic acid) monolith with anisotropic macropores was facilely fabricated via magnetically induced coprecipitation polymerization. For this preparation, the external magnetic force (25 mT) on the swollen magnetic latexes in acrylic acid monomers and n-hexadecane served as the key point, which directed these latexes being aligned into anisotropic porous skeleton. Subsequently, the aligned polymer latexes were polymerized into a very tough and anisotropic porous monolith. The proposed porous monolith was analyzed by various physical characterization, by which it exhibited the anisotropic macropores centered at 8.5 μm, specific surface area of about 37 m2 g–1, and high permeability of 1.385 × 10–14 m2, respectively. Finally, the anisotropic porous monolith was evaluated for adsorption efficiency. And, its adsorption capacities reached 52.76 mg g–1 for Cu2+ and 116.14 mg g–1 for Co2+, respectively. All these results proved that the constructed anisotropic porous channels facilitated the improved adsorption abilities in terms of capacity, separation speed, and resolution.