Synthesis of a novel chelating resin containing hexylthioglycolate group and a few of its applications

A chelating resin having sulphur as the donor atom has been synthesized by suspension polymerization of highly cross-linked styrene, divinylbenzene and methyl methacrylate and was characterized on the basis of elemental analysis, FTIR, SEM, TGA and physico-chemical parameters. The adsorption properties of the synthesized resin (SR) were compared with two commercially available resins viz., a chelating resin (C1) containing thiol group and another chelating resin (C2) containing thio-uronium group. In Chromatographic column separations, for a binary mixture of Zn (II) and Cd (II) and for a ternary mixture of Zn (II), Cd (II) and Hg (II), the SR manifested slightly higher recovery values of the heavy metal ions in comparison to C1 and C2. Similarly, for the recovery of Zn (II), Cd (II) and Ni (II) from industrial wastewater samples and for the recovery of Cu (II) and Ni (II) from printed circuit board (PCB) scrap solution, the performance of SR was found to be somewhat better as compared to both C1 and C2.