Collector of dissolved metal from sea water having an amidoxime group and a hydrophilic group, a method for production thereof

Abstract

A collector is disclosed that is made of a polyolefin fiber having amidoxime groups and that is capable of efficient adsorptive recovery of useful metals such as uranium, vanadium, cobalt and titanium which are dissolved in small quantities in seawater. In the presence of a polymerizable monomer having a hydrophilic group, a polymerizable monomer having a cyano group is grafted to a polyolefin fiber by radiation-initiated graft polymerization to form both a hydrophilic group and a cyano group in the same graft side chains, and the cyano groups in the graft side chains are reacted with hydroxylamine to be converted to amidoxime groups, thereby producing a collector capable of recovering dissolved metals from seawater.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.