Chemical Modification of Polystyrene Merrifield: Extraction of Zinc and Magnesium Located in Wastewater

In order to remove metals (Zn & Mg) located in wastewater, a new series of clickable polystyrene Merrifield grafted with azide and alkynes were synthesized and implicated in this domain. In a first step, we transformed the polystyrene Merrifield into the known Azidomethyl polystyrene, in a second step, a coupling reaction between the Azidomethyl polystyrene and dipropargylamine was realized for the synthesis of a new terminated polystyrene alkyne containing one unit of (1,4)-triazole. To increase the length of the chain grafted on the polystyrene Merrifield, several coupling reactions are applied, the main idea of this work was to increase the number of (1,2,3) –triazole units of this grafted chain. The click chemistry based on the Huygens’s reaction catalyzed by copper (I) was used in this synthesis, the new polymers containing (1,4)-disubstituted triazole are tested for the extraction of Mg and Zn located in wastewater. The structure of new obtained polymers was confirmed by infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), UV-visible spectroscopy and elemental analysis for nitrogen. Differential Thermal Analysis (DTA) and Thermo Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) were used to study crosslinking behavior of these polymers. This study shows a low selectivity of studied polymers for the retention of magnesium, while for the Zinc, the percentage removal was average, it’s in the order of 30%.