Investigation of gamma radiation effect on the anion exchange resin Amberlite IRA-400 in hydroxide form by Fourier transformed infrared and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies

Radiation-induced decomposition of the anion exchange resin Amberlite IRA-400 in hydroxide form by gamma radiolysis has been studied under different irradiation doses and irradiation atmospheres. In this work, we focused on the degradation of the solid part of the resin by Fourier transformed infrared (FTIR) and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopies associated with chemometric treatments. FTIR and 13C NMR techniques showed that only CH2N+(CH3)3 groups were detached from the resin whereas the polystyrene divinylbenzene backbone remains intact. The quaternary ammonium groups were replaced by amine or carbonyl groups according to the irradiation atmosphere (with or without water or oxygen). Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to classify the degraded resins according to their irradiation conditions by separating the effect of the dose or the environment. The PCA loadings have shown spectral regions which discriminate the irradiated resins whereas SIMPLe-to-use Interactive Self-modeling Mixture Analysis (SIMPLISMA) allows to identify families of component characterizing the chemical structure of resins and estimate their relative contributions according to the irradiation atmospheres.

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► Our works complete the existing studies on the γ-radiation impact on the Amberlite IR400 in OH form.
► The irradiation effect under different conditions was determined from an experimental design.
► Its structure was characterized by resolving FTIR and 13C NMR concatenated data from chemometric tools.
► Principal components analysis discriminated influencing factors as doses and conditions.
► SIMPLISMA allowed to identify the new chemical functional groups and their relative proportion.