Enhancement of Uranyl Adsorption Capacity and Selectivity on Silica Sol-Gel Glasses via Molecular Imprinting

The properties of sol-gel glasses templated with uranyl ions have been investigated. Techniques have been developed to remove the template uranyl ions from silica matrixes to create uranyl-imprinted sol-gel silica glasses. A significant increase in affinity and selectivity of the imprinted sol-gel sorbents over control blanks has been observed while the surface areas of both remain equal. The enhanced capacity and selectivity are tentatively attributed to the change of the binding constant and the modification of the microporous structure of the sol-gel glasses induced by the imprinting technique.