Electron Beam Technologies for Preparation of Polymeric Materials Used for Waste Water Treatment, Agriculture, and Medicine

Radiation research results in the field of polymeric materials, obtained in the last few years by electron beam irradiation of aqueous solutions containing appropriate monomer mixtures, such as acrylamide, acrylic acid and vinyl acetate, are presented. Two types of polymeric flocculants for waste water treatment and three kinds of hydrogels for agriculture and medicine are described. The effects of radiation absorbed dose, radiation absorbed dose rate, and chemical composition of the irradiated solutions upon the polymeric materials characteristics are discussed. The required absorbed dose levels to produce the polymeric flocculants are in the range of 0.3 to 9 kGy and 4 kGy to 12 kGy for hydrogels. Some experimental results obtained by testing polymeric flocculants with waste water from food industry are given. Polymeric material processing was developed on a pilot plant level with ALID-7 electron linear accelerator of 5.5 MeV and 0.7 kW, built in the Electron Accelerator Laboratory of the Institute of Atomic Physics, Bucharest. A new facility permitting the application of simultaneous electron beam and microwave irradiation is presently under investigation. Preliminary results demonstrated that some polymeric flocculant characteristics, such as linearity, were improved by simultaneous electron beam and microwave treatment. Also, the absorbed dose levels decreased and intrinsic viscosity increased, respectively, by about two times by this new material processing method.