Abstract
Organic volatile compounds are an important environmental stake. As liquid-liquid extraction is using huge quantities of organic solvents, finding an alternative process is the focus of many scientific research. Silica based porous liquids are made up with ionic functions grafted on silica nanoparticles. Thanks to their substantial versatility and low volatility, this type of porous liquid is considered in this thesis as a promising candidate to substitute organic phases of liquid-liquid extraction. After a state of the art describing the different types of porous liquids, this thesis describes the synthesis of the selected type I porous liquid and its complete characterization. Effect of several synthesis parameters on structure and porosity was also studied. In order to evaluate the possibility to use such porous liquid to extract metals, their permeability to gas and liquids was studied with small angles neutrons scattering. Thanks to an original in situ experiment coupling neutron scattering and contrast matching gas sorption, it was shown that porosity is not fully accessible to gas when the solid nanospheres are grafted to become liquid. However, a contrast matching study showed that both solid nanospheres and porous liquids are permeable to aqueous solutions. Preliminary extraction tests showed that thanks to this permeability, these materials are able to extract cations such as lead, lanthanum or uranium with interesting proportions. Different extraction mechanisms as sorption, precipitation or chelation on functional groups were obtained. This work shows that extraction of metal species by porous liquid is possible and opens many perspectives for optimization.