Preparation of sorbent containing biopolymer chitosan

Nowadays, the widely used sorption methods are which use organic ion exchangers and inorganic sorbents. The inorganic sorbents are highly selective for the determined ions and highly resistant to radiation, their use is restricted by technological parameters of these materials. Universal method for extraction of radionuclides does not exist. In recent years use of biosorbents comes to the fore, among which we can include the compounds based on chitosan. The materials of the natural biopolymer chitin and chitosan have in their structure a number of functional groups and have high sorption capacity. One of the shortcomings of chitosan is its relatively poor stability in an aqueous acid solution. Therefore, methods for its crosslinking have been proposed to increase its chemical stability. The work was focused on the preparation of biopolymer chitosan with a suitable crosslinking agent - glutaraldehyde, with a future aim to characterize its sorption properties for determination of anthropogenic radionuclides Pu and Am. (authors)