Synthetic polyurethane nanofibrous membrane with sustained rechargeability for integrated air cleaning

Abstract

Health problems caused by airborne particulate matter (PM) and bacteria have placed a severe burden on public health. At present, most personal protective equipment focused on PM filtration but ignored the threat from pathogens like bacteria in the air. Moreover, the disposable protective items such as masks used in large quantities have caused great pollution issues. Hence, in this study, a fresh polyurethane nanofibrous membrane (named as PU/PIU-Cl) was synthesized with imidazolidinyl urea groups as block components for enhanced biocidal effect which not only has extremely high filtration efficiency (up to 99.92%) against particulate pollutants, but also excellent intrinsic antibacterial ability (>99%) and safety, indicating its remarkable performance for integrated air pollution control. Furthermore, the antibacterial ability of the membrane can be facilely regenerated by re-chlorination, and the active chlorine content of PU/PIU-Cl membrane through halogenation hardly decreased after five cycles. Therefore, the PU/PIU-Cl nanofibrous membrane can not only be used as protective equipment, such as masks with sterilization function, but also can effectively alleviate the pollution problem of disposable protective products. • Imidazolidinyl urea groups are employed as block components of polyurethane. • PU/PIU-Cl exhibits intrinsic antibacterial function and high filtration efficiency. • PU/PIU-Cl is low cytotoxic, low cost and reusable, and shows great potential in PPE.