Thin film composite nanofiltration membranes fabricated from quaternized poly(ether ether ketone) with crosslinkable moiety using a benign solvent

Xue Dong; Qifeng Zhang; Suobo Zhang; Shenghai Li

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2015.10.050

Thin film composite nanofiltration membranes fabricated from quaternized poly(ether ether ketone) with crosslinkable moiety using a benign solvent

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2016 Feb 1:463:332-41. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2015.10.050. Epub 2015 Oct 26.

Authors

Xue Dong¹, Qifeng Zhang², Suobo Zhang³, Shenghai Li⁴

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Polymer Ecomaterials, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 5625 Renmin Street, Changchun 130022, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
² Key Laboratory of Polymer Ecomaterials, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 5625 Renmin Street, Changchun 130022, China. Electronic address: qfzhang@ciac.ac.cn.
³ Key Laboratory of Polymer Ecomaterials, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 5625 Renmin Street, Changchun 130022, China. Electronic address: sbzhang@ciac.ac.cn.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Polymer Ecomaterials, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 5625 Renmin Street, Changchun 130022, China.

PMID: 26606594
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2015.10.050

Abstract

Thin film composite nanofiltration membranes were fabricated through dip-coating and in situ cross-linking of quaternized poly(ether ether ketone) containing a certain amount of tertiary amine groups (QAPEEKs) on polyacrylonitrile (PAN) support. The effects of the variables in membrane formation such as the coating polymer concentration, the curing temperature, and the cross-linking agent types on resultant membrane were studied and the membrane properties such as the barrier layer chemical structure, the surface element composition and morphology were investigated. The obtained performance of uncross-linked and cross-linked QAPEEK-70 thin film composites in nanofiltration test was compared. The results indicated that the cross-linking improved the composite membranes' performance. For instance, the membrane cross-linked by bisphenol A diglycidyl ether (BPADGE) named M-C-BPADGE exhibited a MgCl2 rejection of 97.8%, a water flux of 11.8Lm(-2)h(-1), a MWCO of 800Da and corresponding pore size of 0.69nm, while for its uncross-linked membrane named M-U, a MgCl2 rejection of 91.2%, a water flux of 13.5Lm(-2)h(-1), a MWCO with 960Da and a pore size of 0.77nm were found. Furthermore, the M-C-BPADGE membrane exhibited selectivities of 16.0 for separation of mixed Mg(2+) and Na(+) cations, much larger than selectivity of 5.2 obtained for M-U, suggesting that the cross-linked membranes are promising in cation separation.

Keywords: Benign solvent; Cross-linking; Nanofiltration; Quaternized poly(ether ether ketone); Thin film composite.