Adsorption of s-triazines onto polybenzimidazole: A quantitative structure–property relationship investigation

The adsorption of 25 symmetric triazines (s-triazines) on polybenzimidazole (PBI) beads is investigated under equilibrium (batch) conditions. The observed adsorption isotherms of the selected compounds are accurately described by the Freundlich model, while the agreement between the Langmuir model and the experimental data is moderately worse, which seems to reflect the heterogeneous meso- and micro-porosity of PBI and polydispersion in the interaction mechanism. Methylthio- and methoxytriazines exhibit a greater adsorption tendency as compared with chlorotriazines, moreover, progressive dealkylation of amino groups results in a progressive increase of triazine uptake on PBI. Based on these evidences, the adsorption mechanism seems to be governed by a combination of π–π and hydrogen-bonding interactions. Genetic algorithm (GA) variable selection and multilinear regression (MLR) are combined in order to describe the effect of triazine structure on the extraction performance of PBI according to the quantitative structure–property relationship (QSPR) method. qmax, the amount of triazine adsorbed per weight unit of PBI assuming homogeneous monolayer (Langmuir) mechanism, exhibits a great variability within the set of investigated triazines and is the quantity here modelled by QSPR. On the other hand, the Freundlich constant, KF, which expresses the adsorption efficiency under multilayer heterogeneous conditions, even if markedly increases passing from chloro- to methylthio- or methoxytriazines, is less noticeably affected by the fine details of the adsorbate structure, as the number or nature of alkyl fragments bound to the amino groups. To quantitatively relate qmax with the triazine structure GA-MLR analysis is performed on the set of 1664 theoretical molecular descriptors provided by the software Dragon. Finally, a four-dimensional QSPR model is selected based on leave-one-out cross-validation and its prediction ability is further tested on four representative triazines excluded from model calibration. The four descriptors selected by GA-MLR, all belonging to the class of three-dimensional GETAWAY (GEometry, Topology, and Atom-Weights AssemblY) descriptors, adequately represent the structural factors influencing the affinity of triazines to PBI in the batch extraction process.