Poly-thiosemicarbazide membrane for gold recovery

•Simple and scalable fabrication of polymeric membrane adsorbers with high density of adsorption sites.•Pressure-driven permeation process eliminates pore diffusion limitations resulting in extremely fast gold adsorption rates.•Mechanically stable poly-thiosemicarbazide membranes with gold loadings up to 5.4 mmol Au/g.•Easy elution of adsorbed gold for membrane reuse without any decrease in performance.

A novel polymeric membrane adsorber with a high density of adsorption sites that can selectively capture Au(III) ions, is proposed as an efficient alternative to recover gold from dilute solutions. Poly-thiosemicarbazide (PTSC), a polymer that contains one chelate site per monomeric unit, was used to fabricate the membranes. This polymer can be easily processed into membranes by a phase inversion technique, resulting in an open and interconnected porous structure suitable for high flux liquid phase applications. This method overcomes the usual low capacities of membrane adsorbents by selecting a starting material that contains the adsorption sites within it, therefore avoiding the necessity to add an external agent into the membrane matrix.The resulting mechanically stable PTSC membranes can operate in a pressure driven permeation process, which eliminates the diffusion limitations commonly present in packed column adsorption processes. This process can selectively recover 97% of the gold present in a solution containing a 9-fold higher copper concentration, while operating at a flux as high as 1868 L/m2 h. The maximum gold uptake measured without sacrificing the mechanical stability of the membrane was 5.4 mmol Au/g. Furthermore the gold can be easily eluted from the membrane with a 0.1 M thiourea solution and the membrane can be reused for at least three cycles without any decrease in its performance. Finally, the ability of this membrane for recovering metals from real-life samples, like seawater and tap water, was tested with promising results.

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