Development of conductive two-dimensional metal-organic frameworks self-cleaning membrane for enhanced antibiotics rejection and sustainable fouling mitigation

Abstract

In this study, a novel electroactive NF membrane was constructed for ultrafast rejection of antibiotics with high selectivity and self-cleaning by incorporating a conductive two dimensional metal-organic frameworks (Cu-HHTP) into porous polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) matrix with facile and scalable non-solvent induced phase inversion strategy. Cu-HHTP membrane showed two orders of magnitude higher permeability (198.4 L m−2 h−1·bar−1) than the commercial and most reported NF membranes without sacrificing rejection toward negatively charged tetracycline (95.4 %), positively charged vancomycin (99.9 %) and neutrally charged valinomycin (99.9 %). Interestingly, loading Cu-HHTP with hydrophilic and porous nature can break the permeability-rejection trade-off effect and the mechanism was due to the improved water channel and pollutants sieving. Furthermore, it has stable antibiotics rejection and high flux recovery rate of 93.9 % for long-term filtration of wastewater over 264 h with low energy consumption of 0.1007 W h/L and without adding chemical cleaning agents, which demonstrated its excellent fouling control and stability. This study may guide the development of advanced self-cleaning NF membranes tailored for removal of small molecular emerging contaminants.