Abstract
Poly(acrylamidoxime) adsorbents are often invoked in discussions of mining uranium from seawater. It has been demonstrated repeatedly in the literature that the success of these materials is due to the amidoxime functional group. While the amidoxime-uranyl chelation mode has been established, a number of essential binding constants remain unclear. This is largely due to the wide range of conflicting pKa values that have been reported for the amidoxime functional group in the literature. To resolve this existing controversy we investigated the pKa values of the amidoxime functional group using a combination of experimental and computational methods. Experimentally, we used spectroscopic titrations to measure the pKa values of representative amidoximes, acetamidoxime and benzamidoxime. Computationally, we report on the performance of several protocols for predicting the pKa values of aqueous oxoacids. Calculations carried out at the MP2 or M06-2X levels of theory combined with solvent effects calculated using the SMD model provide the best overall performance with a mean absolute error of 0.33 pKa units and 0.35 pKa units, respectively, and a root mean square deviation of 0.46 pKa units and 0.45 pKa units, respectively. Finally, we employ our two best methods to predict the pKa values of promising, uncharacterized amidoxime ligands. Hence, our study provides a convenient means for screening suitable amidoxime monomers for future generations of poly(acrylamidoxime) adsorbents used to mine uranium from seawater.
