Acid-resistant polyamine hollow fiber nanofiltration membrane for selective separation of heavy metals and phosphorus

Abstract

The hazardous heavy metals coexisting with phosphorus-containing sewage sludge seriously limit phosphorus recovery. Nanofiltration (NF) membrane, which can selectively separate heavy metals and phosphorus, has a promising potential for recovering high-quality phosphorus from sewage sludge. In this work, we utilized the undissociated form of H3PO4 at pH <2 and customized an acid-stable polyamine NF membrane via interfacial polymerization (IP) for separating phosphorus and heavy metals under acidic conditions. An interlayer formed via co-deposition of tannic acid (TA) and diethylenetriamine (DETA) was firstly coated onto the polyethersulfone (PES) hollow fiber module to assist the spreading of aqueous phase on the substrate surface. Consequently, a tight and positively charged polyamine layer with a mean pore size of 0.77 nm was successfully constructed on the PES substrate, which is smaller than that of the membrane without interlayer (1.39 nm). This polyamine membrane maintained excellent stability during 15-day acid testing with 0.1 M HCl as feed solution. When it was used to recover phosphorus at acidic condition (pH 2), the phosphorus rejection of the NF membrane was only 9.8 %, much lower than that at neutral pH (46.7 %), which is due to the fact that most phosphorus existed in the undissociated form of H3PO4 at pH 2. Meanwhile, given the fine-tuning pore size and Donnan exclusion effect of this membrane, it could effectively retain 96.9 % of Mg2+ and over 93.5 % of most heavy metal ions such as Pb2+, Cu2+, Fe3+, Zn2+, and Cr3+, alongside outstanding water permeability of 20.3 LMH/bar at 2-bar operation pressure. This result demonstrates the potential of our homemade polyamine membrane in phosphorus recovery.