Abstract
The scarcity of drinking water and the contamination of water sources in underdeveloped countries are serious problems that require immediate low-tech and low-cost solutions. In this study, we fabricated polyacrylonitrile (PAN) porous membranes coated with silver nanoparticles (AgNP) and demonstrated their use for water filtration and water treatment applications. The membranes were prepared by electrospinning a PAN solution and treating in a hydroxylamine (NH2OH) aqueous solution to form –C(NH2)N–OH groups that were used for functionalization (Ag+ ions) of the membrane. The coordinated silver ions were then converted to silver nanoparticles. The microstructure of the membrane, water permeability, antimicrobial effect (using Escherichia coli), and particulate filtration capabilities were studied. This study verified that the membrane demonstrated a 100% reduction for Gram-negative bacteria with an effective filtration rate of 8.0 mL/cm2 min. Furthermore, the membrane was able to eliminate 60% of latex beads as small as 50 nm and over 80% of the 2 µm beads via gravity filtration. This study demonstrated that PAN–AgNP membranes can be employed as antimicrobial membranes for the filtration of water in underdeveloped countries.
Highlights
Water shortage and the availability of clean drinking water sources are of serious concern in most developing and developed countries
There was Silver nanoparticle-functionalized membranes were prepared by electrospinning no significant drop in particulate filtration efficiency, suggesting that the filter membrane canfollowed be used by treating the membrane with hydroxylamine and AgNO3 by photoreduction
Membrane had coordinated silver ions that were converted to silver nanoparticles
Summary
Water shortage and the availability of clean drinking water sources are of serious concern in most developing and developed countries. To address these issues, researchers have utilized porous membranes for developing filter media that can be used for water purification and water treatment. Compared to other conventional processing techniques, electrospinning has obtained tremendous interest among researchers as the process is simple, reproducible, cost-effective, and scalable for the development of porous membranes for water filtration and treatment [2,3,4,5,7,8,10,11,15,18,19,20,26,27,28,29] PAN porous membranes produced using various processing techniques have been widely investigated for water filtration applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,26,29,30].
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