Performance improvement of polyethersulfone ultrafiltration membrane containing variform inorganic nano-additives

Abstract

Lamellar graphene oxide (GO) and hollow halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) have aroused increasing interest with their unique structure and performance, deriving a new research direction for materials science. In this work, polyethersulfone (PES) ultrafiltration (UF) composite membrane incorporated with lamellar GO and hollow HNTs were prepared via non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS) process, respectively. The prepared membranes were characterized by using various techniques, including Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), Raman spectra, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Confocal Scanning Microscopy (CSM), etc. Remarkably, the pure water flux of composite membranes with 0.05 wt% GO and 0.01 wt% HNTs loading reached maximum values of 327 and 346 L m−2 h−1, respectively. Moreover, the permeability of PES/HNTs composite membranes were more stable than PES/GO composite membranes. The rejection of the prepared composite membranes for bovine serum albumin (BSA) almost reached 98.5%, while it exhibits quite different flux recovery ratio in the anti-fouling test, which indicates that the variform inorganic nano-additives could produce widely divergent influences on the performance of membrane.