Polymer sorbent materials for the extraction of organic compounds

This thesis describes how modifying PDMS can influence the polymer's sorbent properties towards organic compounds in aqueous matrices. Where each new sorbent's extraction performance was measured through TD-GC-MS and characterized through various analytical techniques. Chapter 1: Gives a brief introduction to the analytical techniques used within the thesis whilst outlining the current state-of-the-art PDMS modification techniques reported in recent literature. Chapter 2: Provides the detailed design of experiment and the corresponding materials used for each results chapter. Chapter 3: This chapter shows the results and discussions section for the encapsulation of amines with PDMS. In which each PDMS-based material demonstrated variable sorptive extraction properties towards organic compounds in aqueous solutions compared to PDMS. However, each material presented thermal instability and extraction performance dropped over time. Chapter 4: Highlights how bonding amines to PDMS improved the thermal stability of the sorbent material. However, the TD-GC-MS results showed little variance in extraction performance compared to that of the currently used PDMS, unlike that of the encapsulated method. Chapter 5: This section looked at how a novel preparation technique aimed to incorporate established commercially available sorbents within the PDMS. These bi-phasic sorbents were tested for organic compound extraction via TD-GC-MS. The results showed that the PDMS-Tenax GR outperformed all other sorbents for most of the tested organic compounds. Whilst demonstrating both chemical and thermal robustness. The main issue around this section was how to scale-up the material preparation step. Chapter 6: This chapter provides an overview of the results obtained during the thesis while highlighting the areas of improvement. Future works state the direction this research should move based on the result obtained.