Modification of electrospun polyacrylonitrile nanofiber membranes with curcumin quantum dots for enhanced self-cleaning, antifouling and photocatalytic performance for water treatment

Abstract

This work presents the fabrication of electrospun PAN-CMQD nanofiber membranes by blending laser ablated curcumin quantum dots (CMQD) with polyacrylonitrile (PAN) for water treatment application. The electrospinning process conditions were optimized using TOPSIS-Taguchi L9 (33) approach to develop membranes with superior membrane performance. The PAN-CMQD nanofiber membranes were of average fibre diameter 85.89 nm and exhibited increased hydrophilicity and improved membrane performance with 53.01 %, 36.74 %, 58.03 %, 37.68 % and 57.33 % increase in porosity, solute rejection, fouling rejection ratio, tensile strength and pure water flux respectively in contrast to the pristine PAN membrane. The PAN-CMQD nanofiber membrane possessed enhanced recyclability, self-cleaning ability, antibacterial activity and also showed good heavy metal ion removal efficiency towards Pb2+, Fe2+, Cr6+, Cd2+ and Mn2+. The PAN-CMQD membrane also showed 98.80 % photocatalytic degradation efficiency towards methylene blue dye under visible light irradiation. This study proves that PAN-CMQD nanofiber membrane is efficient in treating contaminated water with improved photocatalytic and self-regeneration capacity and the developed membrane could possibly be deployed for the mitigation of heavy metals and dyes from industrial waste water.