Abstract
Polymer membranes have been modified with hyperbranched polymers with the aim to generate a high density of hydrophilic functional groups at the membrane surface. For this purpose hyperbranched polymers containing amino, alcohol, and carboxylic acid end groups were used for membrane modification, respectively. Thus, surface potential and charges were changed significantly to result in attractive or repulsive interactions towards three different proteins (albumin, lysozyme, myoglobin) that were used to indicate membrane fouling properties. Our studies demonstrated that hydrophilization alone is not effective for avoiding membrane fouling when charged proteins are present. In contrast, electrostatic repulsion seems to be a general key factor.
Highlights
Modern separation technologies such as waste water treatment, sterilization filtration, hemodialysis, the production of fine chemicals, processes of the dairy industry, etc., are predominantly based on using porous polymer membranes [1]
Not many approaches have been proposed using hyperbranched polymers or dendritic structures to generate hydrophilic groups on membranes surfaces, these structures should offer a high density of functional groups at the membrane surface
polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) microfiltration membranes have been modified with three different hydrophilic
Summary
Modern separation technologies such as waste water treatment, sterilization filtration, hemodialysis, the production of fine chemicals, processes of the dairy industry, etc., are predominantly based on using porous polymer membranes [1]. Polymer membranes are fabricated from robust synthetic materials such as polyethersulfone (PES), polysulfone (PSf), or polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) which offer high stability within a broad range of process conditions [2]. Not many approaches have been proposed using hyperbranched polymers or dendritic structures to generate hydrophilic groups on membranes surfaces, these structures should offer a high density of functional groups at the membrane surface. Diverse methods have been developed to create hyperbranched polymer structures on top of polymer surfaces including neutral, alkaline, or acidic end groups [33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40] Since some of these structures can be generated in a step-wise manner by growing generations successively, the density of functional groups can be controlled by the number of generations that is developed
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