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ANN modeling in Pb(II) removal from water by clay‐polymer composites fabricated via the melt‐blending
Author(s) -
Dlamini Derrick S.,
Mishra Ajay K.,
Mamba Bhekie B.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of applied polymer science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.575
H-Index - 166
eISSN - 1097-4628
pISSN - 0021-8995
DOI - 10.1002/app.39656
Subject(s) - materials science , composite material , adsorption , composite number , polycaprolactone , polymer , thermoplastic , chemistry , organic chemistry
This work presents two new related aspects in heavy‐metal adsorption. The first aspect is the use of Cloisite ® C20A‐polycaprolactone (C20A‐PCL) composite with the aid of dry Na2SO4 in Pb(II) extraction from water. The composite was fabricated by means of the melt‐blending method at a filler loading rate of 3% (w/w). This material was able to remove 87% of Pb(II) from water despite the fact that the polymer is a thermoplastic and the C20A is hydrophobic. The second aspect is the modeling of the adsorption data obtained using polymer‐clay composites synthesized via the melt‐blending method by artificial neural networks. A network with 10 neurons and using TRAINLM, and employing tansig function in the input layer and purelin in the output layer was found to be optimal. The network was used to predict the adsorption efficiency of Pb(II) by several clay‐polymer composites and the correlation was satisfactory. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 130: 3894–3901, 2013