Multifunctional Polydopamine Particles as a Thermal Stability Modifier to Prepare Antifouling Melt Blend Composite Membranes

Rong Liu; Yunan Zhu; Fei Jiang; Yijun Fu; Wei Zhang; Yu Zhang; Guangyu Zhang

doi:10.1021/acsomega.0c04915

Multifunctional Polydopamine Particles as a Thermal Stability Modifier to Prepare Antifouling Melt Blend Composite Membranes

ACS Omega. 2021 Jan 5;6(2):1352-1360. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.0c04915. eCollection 2021 Jan 19.

Authors

Rong Liu¹, Yunan Zhu¹, Fei Jiang², Yijun Fu¹, Wei Zhang¹, Yu Zhang¹, Guangyu Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Textile & Clothing, National & Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Technical Fiber Composites for Safety and Health, Nantong University, Nantong 226019, P. R. China.
² Hefei Food and Drug Inspection Center, Hefei 230088, P. R. China.

Abstract

This study reports a novel, multifunctional, and easily obtained modifier to support the rapid advancements in the field of filtration. Polydopamine (PDA) particles (PDAPs) have been reported as a filler for constructing polymer composites, but because of their poor thermal stability, the use of PDAPs in high-temperature blend melt systems to construct antifouling membranes was rare. In this paper, high-thermal-stability methoxy polyethylene glycol amine (mPEG-NH₂)-functionalized PDA nanoparticles (mPDAPs) were first used as a modifier in high-temperature blend melt polymer composites to construct antifouling composite membranes. First, high-thermal-stability mPDAPs with an average diameter of about 390 nm were prepared by immobilized mPEG-NH₂ on the PDAP surface, then melt blend mPDAPs with ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene/liquid paraffin (LP) solution and thermally reduced phase separation (TIPS) to construct antifouling membranes. A combination of properties including mechanical properties, filtration efficiency, and antifouling properties of hybrid composite membranes was investigated and demonstrated that mPDAPs were an efficient modifier for high-temperature melt blending systems. The aim of this study was to provide an effective approach to improve the membrane filtration performance by bulk hybrid modification of multifunctional nanoparticles.