The effect of mechanical activation on the structure and sorption activity of chitin

A mechanical activation of chitin suspended in water has been employed under conditions of a combined impact of cavitation and high shear stresses realized in a rotor-pulse device. For chitin samples that underwent preliminary activation for 5–20 s, the value of sorption capacity toward copper ions increased twoto fourfold in dependence on the treatment duration as compared to the initial sample. The experimental data corroborating that the main factors of mechanical activation are the increase of the specific surface area, porosity, and particle-chitin amorphization are presented. It has been established that the increase of the duration of mechanical treatment over the experimentally determined optimal value yields a decrease of the activation effect, which is related to the processes of restructuring and recrystallization. It has been shown that the Langmuir model allows rather adequate description of the sorption process with the correlation coefficient of 0.98–0.99.