High-flux, antibacterial composite membranes via polydopamine-assisted PEI-TiO2/Ag modification for dye removal

By Jian Li, Shushan Yuan, JunYong Zhu, B. Van der Bruggen. Chemical Engineering Journal, 2019

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The use of engineered nanomaterials in membrane design has proved promising to enhance the membrane separation performance and confer additional specific functionalities to a membrane. Enlightened by the robust adhesion of bioinspired coatings, super-hydrophilic titanium dioxide (TiO2) coupled with polyethylenimine (PEI) was stably anchored on the surface of a polydopamine (PDA)-coated membrane through vacuum filtration. The combination of organic-inorganic hybrid layer with PDA coating endowed the composite membrane with an excellent separation performance. Further in-situ formation of silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) onto the composite membrane enabled the membrane with a high antibacterial activity. The effect of TiO2 concentration on membrane separation performance was studied. The results demonstrated that PEI plays a key role to achieve a superior dye rejection, although it resulted in a distinctly decrease of water permeability. As the TiO2 loading amount increases, the water permeability notably enhanced with an overall high rejection of dye solutions. The optimal composite membrane had a quite high water permeability of 40.6 L m−2 h−1 bar−1, and an excellent dye rejection. Plate counting method results showed that the Ag decorated composite membrane had a high bacteriostatic rate of 99.7%. This facile fabrication procedure and outstanding separation performance suggest that the modified membranes have a high potential in treating dye wastewater.

Subfields: Organic Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/690eee599a099e3899036cd4a914f825ac796a4e