Synthesis of Grafted Cellulose with Methacrylate Homopolymer for Copper Removal

Abstract

Cellulose is one of the most abundant natural polymers on Earth. Nevertheless, one of the drawbacks of cellulose is it does not soluble in many common solvent such as distilled water, methanol, and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). The main purpose of this study was to synthesis cellulose-g-PHEMA via the “grafting onto” method on the blended cellulose from Whatman filter paper with poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (PHEMA). PHEMA was synthesized from its monomer, HEMA by Reversible Addition-Fragmentation Chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerisation carried out at 80C for 24 hours. The solubility of blended cellulose, PHEMA, and cellulose-g-PHEMA were tested in distilled water, methanol and DMSO. For swelling test, solvent used is deionized water while copper removal testing required immersion of blended cellulose, PHEMA, and cellulose-g-PHEMA in copper (II) sulphate solution for 2 to 6 hours range. In this study, PHEMA was synthesized by RAFT polymerisation with 63.78% of monomer conversion. For the esterification, blended cellulose was grafted with PHEMA by 39.72% of grafting and 33.10% of efficiency of polymerisation. Then, cellulose-g-PHEMA synthesized for 5 hours showed better swelling ability than the blended cellulose. The modification of blended cellulose with synthetic polymer, PHEMA, showed some differences in the physical properties in terms of solubility and swelling, thus also expected to show some influence in the copper removal test.