Highly efficient removal of Eu3+ ions using carbon nanotubes-based polymer composites synthesized from the combination of Diels-Alder and multicomponent reactions

Abstract The removal of environmental pollutants through adsorption by nanomaterials or nanocomposites has attracted great attention over the past few decades. In this work, a novel strategy that combined with Diels-Alder (DA) and multicomponent reactions has been developed to fabricate carbon nanotubes (CNT) based polymer composites and their potential utilization for removal of rare earth ions from wastewater. First, the amino groups were introduced on the CNT through the DA reaction between CNT and furfurylamine. The obtained amino group-terminating CNT composites (named as CNT-FFA) were further conjugated with the polymers through Kabachnik–Fields (KF) reaction. To evidence the successful fabrication of these CNT based polymer composites, a variety of characterization methods, such as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), transmission electron microscope (TEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), were used to measure the chemical structure, compositions and thermal stability of CNT based polymer composites. Furthermore, a series of adsorption experiments were implemented to explore the influence of contact time, temperature, initial concentration and pH for adsorption behavior. The results demonstrated that the adsorption capability of resultant CNT based composites (CNT-FFA-PAA) towards Eu3+ ions is about 130.8 mg g−1, which is much greater than that of pristine CNT (46.67 mg g−1). The above results demonstrated that the method described in this work is a facile and effective tool for fabrication of functional CNT polymer composites, which possess promising prospects for environmental adsorption applications. More importantly, this method in this work could be generally applied in the surface modification of other materials for various applications.