Recent progress in sodium alginate based sustainable hydrogels for environmental applications

Abstract

Recently, there is a growing research interest in the applications and development of novel sustainable hydrogel materials in waste water treatment because of radically distinctive chemical and physical characteristics of hydrogels such as hydrophilicity, swell ability and modifiability to name a few. Hydrogels have exposed the hypernym functioning in the removal of a wide range of aqueous pollutants containing toxic dyes and heavy metal ions. A large amount of water gets incorporated in the three dimensional networks of hydrophilic structures of hydrogels. The prime objective of this review article is to render a presentation on the recent advances in the modifications of sodium alginate based hydrogels for the adsorptive removal of toxic pollutants. In addition, article also briefly gives the classification and properties of hydrogels and alginate.

The Innovation Comes from the Sea: Chitosan and Alginate Hybrid Gels and Films as Sustainable Materials for Wastewater Remediation

“…In alginate structure, abundant free hydroxyl and carboxyl groups are distributed along the backbone chain of the polymer [7]. Since alginates are biocompatible, biodegradable, non-toxic, stable in the environment and have strong gelation, film-forming, and complexing abilities [7], they have been used as biomaterials for several applications including tissue engineering scaffolds, drug delivery systems, wound dressings, antibacterial agents [3], immobilized biocatalysts (carrying enzymes), as multifunctional additives within food and beverage industries [8], and for energetic [9] and environmental remediation purposes [7,10].…”

“…Concerning this work, it is worth specifying that both alginate and chitosan-based gels have been already widely exploited as adsorbents in water remediation, due to the presence of carboxylic acids and amine groups [27], which can act as chelation/coordination sites for the removal of heavy metals, dyes and emerging pollutants [10,28].…”

Electrospinning Highly Concentrated Sodium Alginate Nanofibres without Surfactants by Adding Fluorescent Carbon Dots

“…Sodium alginate (SA) is a natural polysaccharide extracted from brown algae. SA is a linear polymer composed of two glucose units, α-L-mannuronic acid and β-D-guluronic acid, which are randomly linked by 1,4-glycosidic bonds [4,7,8]. SA is nontoxic and has excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability [9,10], thus, it is widely used in bioengineering fields in applications such as tissue scaffolding and drug delivery [11].…”

Progress in pectin based hydrogels for water purification: Trends and challenges

“…These are also crosslinked polymer chains that soaks up tolerable quantity of water or any aqueous solution (Thakur et al, 2018c). The network chains are possessed by the homopolymers or co-polymers and are unsolvable due to the existence of chemical crosslink (Bae et al, 2015;Li et al, 2014;Ren et al, 2014;Singh and Singh, 2012;Wichterle and Lim, 1960) (tie-points, junctions) or physical crosslink, such as involvement or crystallization.…”