Green Nano-polymer for Fast Screening of Heavy Metals
Porphyrin and its families are widely applied in various commercial products like chemical sensors, bio-imaging agents and cancer drugs. These products are usually applied with synthetic and petroleum-based polymers as the building block. During the incorporation with porphyrin, a complex procedure is involved while hazardous chemical reagents are always created.
In this prototype, a natural plant-based polymer (Alkali lignin) is applied for incorporation with Porphyrin. The produced biorefinery-derived Lignin-porphyrin Nano-polymer (Lignin-TPP) demonstrated remarkable performance and contain outstanding feature which cannot be provided by the original chemicals alone. It can be served as a rapid sensor to detect different types of heavy metals via simple UV-vis spectroscopy (R2=0.99). In comparison with porphyrin, the emission intensity of Lignin-TPP is significantly enhanced (>50 folds) in high-water fraction (>90%) environments with broad pH range. Therefore, it showed the potentials in bio-imaging application due to its stable and intense emission at a broad range of pH.
This technology demonstrated an example of effective utilizing lignin to fabricate a new functional material and offering significant benefits to waste valorization and industries.