Atıf Detayı

Sorption of ions as well as organic molecules from aqueous media by calixarene based materials has been a widely developing area in material science and technology since last few decades. Mostly, it is achieved by the immobilization (physically or chemically) of modified calixarenes onto various supports such as polymers, silica, and resins. The calixarene macrocycles due to their bowl-shaped geometry are indeed used as hosts allowing organic and inorganic guests to coordinate/sorb onto their cavity. The possibility of designing versatile organic, coordination and organometallic architectures at the lower (narrow) and upper (wide) rims of the calixarenes are also very appealing for extending the cavity, or to take advantage of the proximity to promote substituent interactions. Thus, novel calixarene derivatives are continue to being synthesized and appended in polymeric materials in order to obtain regenerable resins for the recovery of various elements (metals/metalloids/non-metals) and neutral molecules. The calixarene based sorbents are generally applied in various fields such as catalyst recovery, power plant, agriculture, metals finishing, microelectronics, biotechnology processes, rare earths speciation, and potable water. Besides this, they find applications in the area of selective ion extractions, receptors, catalysis, optical devices, chemical sensor devices, the stationary phase for capillary chromatography, ion transport membranes, biomimetics, and luminescence probes etc. This survey is focused to have an overview of calixarene based sorbents for the extraction of ions and neutral molecules. The article does not, however, attempt to cover all of the different approaches to extraction processes. © 2009 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.