| Summary: | In this paper, we consider two different polyethylene filter plates coated with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and synthesized by surface molecularly imprinted technique, namely plate@MWCNTs@MIPs (PMIPs) and plate@MWCNTs@NIPs (PNIPs). They were used as effective adsorbents for selective adsorption and detection of prednisone (PS) in cosmetics. As a first assessment to investigate the performance of these adsorbents, the PS adsorption isotherms were analyzed using an advanced multilayer statistical physics model at three different temperatures ( 293, 303 and 313 K) and over a wide PS concentration range (0.09–1.5 mg/mL). The obtained analyzing results from the best fitting model showed that the PMIPs adsorbent displayed a high adsorption capacity (27.4 mg/g) due to the contribution of the number of PS molecules per site (nm) combined with the receptor sites density (Dm), which displayed a high recognition ability due to the adsorption energy. Modeling analysis process indicated that the PS molecules could be anchored on the PMIPs and PNIPs surfaces via a non-parallel orientation where the adsorption is a multi-molecular process. The calculated adsorption energies globally varied from 4.51 to 7.62 kJ/mol, confirming the physical nature of the adsorption process for the studied systems, which is beneficial in cosmetics. Finally, three thermodynamic potentials (entropy, internal energy and free enthalpy) were evaluated for a better understanding of the physico-chemical behavior of the adsorption process.
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