Poly(Methacrylic Acid) Gels for Removing of Naphthalene from Water: Effect of Synthetic Conditions

Polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are environmental hormones and carcinogens, are viewed as the priority pollutants to deal with by many countries. Most PAHsare hydrophobic with high boiling and melting points and high electrochemical stability, but with low water solubility.Compared with other PAH species, naphthalene has less toxicity and is easily found in the environment. Thus, naphthalene is usually adopted as a model compound toexamine the environmental and health aspects of PAHs. [1]. Due to the refractoriness and difficulty of biologicaldegradation of PAHs, it is found that PAHs have accumulatedin the air, water bodies, soil, and food. Therefore, immediate attention to the effective treatment of PAHs is needed. Amongvarious treatment methods, adsorption technique has been widely studied in recent years due to its cost-effectiveness, simplicity of design and operation. Recently, considerable interest has been generated in the development of polymericadsorbents as a tool for removing PHAs from pollutedsystems. In this work, the feasibility of poly(methacrylic acid) gels for removing naphthalene from aqueous aluminium solution wasstudied. In this relate, the synthetic conditions for preparation of gels, i.e., concentrations of monomer, crosslinker and initiator to achieve maximum absorbency of naphthalene were optimized through the Taguchi experimental design method..