Selective Recovery of Gold from E-Wastewater Using Poly-<i>m</i>-phenylenediamine Nanoparticles and Assembled Membranes
Author(s)
Chen, Yuchao
Wang, Li
Shu, Yufei
Han, Qi
Chen, Beizhao
Wang, Mengxia
Liu, Xun
Rehman, Danyal
Liu, Bei
Wang, Zhongying
Date Issued
August 4, 2023
Journal
ACS Applied Engineering Materials
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Citation
Chen, Yuchao, Wang, Li, Shu, Yufei, Han, Qi, Chen, Beizhao et al. 2023. "Selective Recovery of Gold from E-Wastewater Using Poly-m-phenylenediamine Nanoparticles and Assembled Membranes." ACS Applied Engineering Materials, 1 (8).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The economic value of recovering gold from electronic waste (e-waste) has generated significant interest, but selective capture of gold from complex acidic electronic leaching solutions remains challenging. Here, we synthesized Poly-m-phenylenediamine (PmPD) nanoparticles with a positively charged surface and amino functional groups, resulting in an adsorption capacity of 2063 mg/g for Au(Ⅲ) in acidic solutions, superior to most traditional adsorbents. Electrostatic adsorption and reduction were identified as the adsorption mechanism for Au(Ⅲ) by zeta potential, XRD, TEM, FT-IR, and XPS analyses. To enable adsorbent recycle, PmPD nanoparticles were assembled into adsorptive membranes and used for gold recovery from e-wastewater via a continuous-flow membrane separation process. The PmPD membrane achieved a dynamic gold recovery capacity of approximately 530 mg/g and could be effectively regenerated after washing with a mixture of thiourea and HCl. We demonstrated the practical application of the adsorptive membranes by recovering about 100% of gold from the leaching solution of waste printed circuit boards of computers. Finally, the recovered gold nanoparticles on PmPD membrane were used to catalyze the degradation of p-nitrophenol, showcasing the catalytic property of gold. The Au@PmPD membrane loaded with 4 mg gold exhibited a high catalytic reduction performance with an apparent rate constant of 0.59 min−1 , one of the highest catalytic degradation rate constants of p-nitrophenol reported to date. Our study presents an effective and economical approach for recovering gold from e-waste, providing a prototype of resource recovery and reuse.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsaenm.3c00259
