Alcoholic and phenolic hydrogen-bond (HB) acidic sorbents activated by fluorine chemistries have been previously developed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and elsewhere to augment sorbent HB acidity, reduce sorbent HB basicity and target complementary HB basicity of a wide range of hazardous target chemicals. Although these interactions have been studied in some detail and a wide range of related HB acidic sorbents have been developed, a significant limitation with them to date has been the propensity for sorbent self-association. This intermolecular bonding between sorbent molecules limits sorbate access to active HB acid sites in the sorbent, limiting its overall efficacy.<br/>In this current work our aim has been to develop improved HB acidic sorbent compounds which minimize undesired sorbent self-association. By significantly freeing up sorbent HB acid sites we offer the potential for an advance in sorbent performance by improved sorption kinetics, capacity, and sorptivity for target chemicals at trace levels. These improved sorbents are expected to provide physicochemical properties suitable for a wide range of applications including analyte collection, chromatography separation, transducer sensing, and protection applications employing sorbents as filtration media. A series of new HB acidic sorbents have been synthesized and the subsequent sorbent-sorbate interactions have been characterized by a number of methods. Infrared spectroscopy has been used to help elucidate sorbent-vapor interactions. Additional characterization has been performed with quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) gravimetry to quantify sorption kinetics and gas partitions. Finally, inverse gas chromatography (IGC) provides a series of gas-sorbent partition coefficients. These partition coefficients are then used to solve solvation equations to quantify a number of sorbent properties and allow gas-sorbent partitions to be predicted for a wide range of hazardous chemicals. This presentation will cover recent advances in our efforts to synthesize and characterize new sorbent materials.

Advances in sorbent materials for detection and protection applications

256th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.