The Faculty of Graduate Studies awarded the researcher Basima Qasem Ahmad “Radwan Khleif” a Master’s Degree in Chemistry in response to her thesis entitled “Synthesis of Three Dimensional Cellulose Diamine Polymer for Wastewater Purification”.

Cellulose is the most abundant natural product, it has unlimited number of industrial applications. It reacts like alcohol and can be converted into various polymers with various functionalities. In this work cellulose extracted from OISW was converted to cellulose dialdehyde by oxidation with periodate, then reacted with the bifunctional amine 1,4 diaminobenzene to form cellulose diimine which then reduced to cellulose diamine by reacting it with sodium borohydride. The structure of the prepared polymers were analyzed by FT-IR, NMR (13C), and other spectroscopic and thermal methods. Produce cellulose diamine has a unique molecular structure, diamine compound holds the cellulose chain together and both form a kind of crown amine. The crown amine cages have several binding sites of nitrogen and oxygen that are distributed though the ring. These sites have high affinity for metals. The prepared cellulose diamine was used to extract toxic metals form wastewater. The metal that were extracted are lead, iron, and copper. The extraction efficiency of the cellulose diamine for these metals was evaluated as a function of pH, adsorbent dosage, temperature and time. The optimum conditions were the temperature was 30 oC, the time was about 100 min, pH was about 4.0 and the dosage is 0.5 g. Under these conditions a quantitative remove of metals from solutions concentrations 10, 20, 50 ppm was attained. The kinetic calculations showed that, adsorption rate followed the

Pseudo-second-order. The R2 for Pseudo-second-order equation was 0.9999.

The committee consisted of: Prof. Shehdeh Jodeh as a main supervisor and Chairman, Dr. Othman Hamed as a second supervisor, Dr. Wadee Sultan as an external examiner and Dr. Ahmad Abu Obaid as an internal examiner.

At the end of the session, the committee approved the success of the researcher and recommended her a Master’s degree.