Abstract
The development of membrane technology from biopolymer for water filtration has received a great deal of attention from researchers and scientists, owing to the growing awareness of environmental protection. The present investigation is aimed at producing poly(D-lactic acid) (PDLA) membranes, incorporated with nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) and cellulose nanowhisker (CNW) at different loadings of 1 wt.% (PDNC-I, PDNW-I) and 2 wt.% (PDNC-II PDNW-II). From morphological characterization, it was evident that the nanocellulose particles induced pore formation within structure of the membrane. Furthermore, the greater surface reactivity of CNW particles facilitates in enhancing the surface wettability of membranes due to increased hydrophilicity. In addition, both thermal and mechanical properties for all nanocellulose filled membranes under investigation demonstrated significant improvement, particularly for PDNW-I-based membranes, which showed improvement in both aspects. The membrane of PDNW-I presented water permeability of 41.92 L/m2h, when applied under a pressure range of 0.1–0.5 MPa. The investigation clearly demonstrates that CNWs-filled PDLA membranes fabricated for this investigation have a very high potential to be utilized for water filtration purpose in the future.
Highlights
Published: 20 January 2021Membrane technology has very commonly been applied in purification, dialysis, filtration, and for pharmaceutical applications for several decades
The nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) was produced from roselle microcrystalline cellulose (MCC), as described elsewhere in our previous paper [20]
Porous structures beeninversion improved afterFor thenanoincorcellulose-filled membranes, their porous structures had been improved after the incorpoporation of nanocellulose, indicating that the nanocellulose particles could induce better ration of nanocellulose, indicating that the nanocellulose particles could induce better pore formation within the within polymer matrix [21]
Summary
Published: 20 January 2021Membrane technology has very commonly been applied in purification, dialysis, filtration, and for pharmaceutical applications for several decades. Polymeric materials are widely utilized for the fabrication of membranes due to their ease of processability, and due to a recent increase in research interest by many researchers to explore optimal processing parameters and methods to produce a membrane with superior performance [2]. The most commonly used methods to fabricate polymeric membranes are by phase inversion [3,4], particulate leaching/solvent merging [5,6], freeze-drying [7] and electro-spinning [8] techniques. Phase inversion is one of the most commonly used methods and well-known in membrane fabrication. It is performed by removing the solvent from a liquid-polymer solution, leaving a porous, solid polymeric membrane.
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