The establishment of PES/AMPS-PAN ultrafiltration membrane with the property of self-repairing both physical and chemical damage

Abstract

Cleaning, oxidant, photocatalysis and operation process will cause chemical or physical damage to the membrane, resulting in a loss of membrane integrity. Self-repairing membranes will help solve this problem without expensive integrity monitoring and membrane replacement. Therefore, this work first prepared the self-repairing PES/AMPS-PAN ultrafiltration membrane that can self-heal both physical damage and chemical damage. AMPS and AMPS-PAN were employed as self-repairing polymers to construct self-repairing membrane. The SEM images, the recovery rate of pure water flux and HA retention rate proved that the PES/AMPS-PAN membrane could realize physical self-repairing process. The XPS result proved that the CC in AMPS and the PES breaking chain underwent a single electron michael addition reaction when the membrane was chemical damaged, realizing the self-repairing of chemical damage. Furthermore, the hydrophilic group in AMPS or AMPS-PAN endowed the membrane hydrophilicity and improved the anti-fouling performance of the membrane. The prepared membrane also illustrated excellent permeability, just like the pure water flux got to 121 L/m2h, while HA retention rate could also maintained at a high level 99.2%. The membranes with different mass ratio of AMPS-PAN (MPAN1 and MPAN3) displayed a better pure water flux recovery rate 90.2% and 92% after chemical cleaning compared with the membrane with no AMPS-PAN (MAMPS0), respectively. The Rir = 18.5% of MPAN3 indicated that the adsorption of HA was prevented by the addition of AMPS-PAN. In a word, the PES/AMPS-PAN membrane not only could self-heal both physical damage and chemical membrane damage, but also endowed the membrane good pollution resistance and permeability.