Controlled synthesis of tower-like aniline oligomers with excellent adsorption properties

Abstract

A nanoplate-based tower-like hierarchical architecture of aniline oligomers has been fabricated via the oxidation polymerization of aniline in NaOH aqueous solution at 35 °C, with ammonium peroxydisulfate as an oxidant. Experimental results indicated that the concentrations of NaOH and aniline, and temperature played important roles in the formation or the uniformity of such oligomer micro-towers. The offspring obtained at different reaction stages has been characterized by FESEM, FTIR and UV-vis techniques to gain insight into the morphological evolvement and chemical structure development of the tower-like product. Based on the results of these characterization techniques, the possible formation mechanism for the oligomer microtower was proposed. In addition, the adsorption properties of the aniline oligomer microtowers toward heavy metal ions (Cu(II) et al.) in water, as well as the sorption isotherms and kinetics were investigated carefully.