Laboratory Practice

Hi All,
I would like to share about my labwork class in HU.

This week, we have practice in Tanaka Sensei Laboratory. In this lab, we synthesized magnetic chitosan as an adsorbent. The basic material of this adsorbent is chitosan, this material has high capacity in adsorbing heavy metal, but the problem is when we finished adsorbing the heavy metals, we hardly collect the adsorbent it self. 

So the idea here is to make an easy collectable adsorbent for removing heavy metals from environment. in order to achieve that purpose, we modified the chitosan with magnetic property. Why we add magnetic property? because it can make the adsorbent easy to collect. How? of course by using magnet. 

How about the real application? it is possible? the answer is YES. For example we want to decontaminate heavy metal from the river. We can spread the adsorbent in upstream of the river and the adsorbent will flow with the water follow the river current. So during this time the adsorbent will adsorb the heavy metal on the river. How to collect the adsorbent after that? we can put magnet net on the downstream of the river, so the water will flow and the adsorbent will be attached to the magnetic net.

Here is the basic example how the magnetic material will be collected:
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jchem/2013/585613.fig.008b.jpg
So, you can imagine how it will be work on the river or on the actual environment situation. There are also another way to make an easy collectable adsorbent, for instance we can modified the adsorbent with spongiform polymer, so the adsorbent can shaped like foam. 

I think that's all for today. Thank you.

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