Synthesis of phillipsite from perlite utilizing mother waters from wet gel EMT preparation and study of the obtained zeolitic material as ion exchanger

In the present paper, a supplementary method was elaborated for synthesis of phillipsite from perlite utilizing mother waters from wet gel EMT preparation. The method is reproducible and cheap—synthesis was performed at mild conditions at 90 °C. One of the obtained phillipsite samples was tested as ion exchanger with solutions containing K⁺, Cs⁺ and Sr²⁺ for simulated radioactive fixation of these ions. The kinetics of ion exchange was adequately described by pseudo-second-order kinetic model equations. The obtained parameters for the ion exchange properties of the synthesized phillipsite show that this material could be used in the Cs⁺ and Sr²⁺ removal in decontamination processes. Cation-exchange effectiveness was also tested for Cs⁺ and Sr²⁺ solutions, contaminated with model nonionic surfactant Pluronic 123, which may appear as a municiple pollutant.