Flinders University‘s researchers have ‘struck gold’ by discovering a new way to create “green polymers” using a small amount of electricity from low-cost building blocks.
At this project no hazardous chemical initiators are required and the reaction that is very fast takes place at room temperature using just a few amount of electricity, The project has many potential uses including in gold mining and recycling e-waste. This has been described by an interdisciplinary team in an article just published in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society.
the Flinders University research group is working on more sustainable options, while hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic is produced every year, with up to half of it is used for single purposes only. Due to this, the researchers of the Flinders University are working on more sustainable options in order to make use of the plastics and e-wastes. So, the power used in production is a contributor to pollution and global warming.
The co-author of the article -Dr Thomas Nicholls- which is an expert in using electrochemistry to make valuable molecules, says: “The use of electricity to produce new materials is an emerging field of research that opens many doors so new chemicals and polymers can be produced in a more sustainable way.
The process begins by adding an electron to the basic building block or monomer. After ‘electrocuting’ the monomer, it reacts with another building block in a chain reaction which leads to the formation of a polymer.
“Our method to electrochemically produce polymers provides new materials that are highly functional and environmentally friendly. First-author and PhD candidate Jasmine Pople says:
“The use of electricity to make valuable molecules is expanding rapidly due to its versatility. Additionally, it may generate less waste than traditional chemical syntheses and it can be powered with renewable energy.”
The key polymer made by the team has sulfur-sulfur bonds in its backbone. These sulfur groups can do useful things like bind precious metals such as gold. The team demonstrated that the key polymer could remove 97% of gold from solutions of relevance to mining and e-waste recycling.
The sulfur-sulfur bonds can also be broken and reformed. This interesting property enabled the team to discover conditions to convert the polymer back to its original building block. This is an important advance in recycling.
Typically, when common plastics are recycled, they are simply heated and reshaped into a new product. This process can cause degradation and down-cycling (conversion to a less valuable material), leading to eventual disposal in landfill.
In contrast, the polymers made in the latest research from Flinders University scientists can be chemically converted back into its constituent building blocks in high yield – meaning that building block can be used again to make new polymers.
The team also carried out quantum mechanical calculations to understand the details of how the reaction works. The findings were surprising and fortuitous.
“The polymerisation has a clever self-correcting mechanism: whenever the wrong reaction occurs, it reverses until the correct reaction proceeds, ensuring a uniform polymer,” says Research Associate in computational and physical chemistry Dr Le Nhan Pham
Future applications of this class of materials include environmental remediation, gold mining, and use of the polymer as an anti-microbial agent.
This work is funded by an ARC Discovery grant ‘Unusual Trisulfide Chemistry’, led by Future Fellow and Matthew Flinders Professor of Chemistry Justin Chalker and Associate Professor Zhongfan Jia in collaboration with Dr Tom Hasell at the University of Liverpool (DP230100587).
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