Three-dimensional basswood-based membrane with well-designed multilevel/hierarchical imprinting surface: A high-efficiency selective separation system

Three-dimensional (3D) basswood materials were successfully applied to construct molecularly imprinted nanocomposite membranes for the first time. Importantly in this work, the TiO2@PDA-based modification layers were initially achieved on basswood surfaces. And 3D mesoporous wood-based molecularly imprinted membranes (3DW-MIMs) with sandwich-like TC-imprinted layers were finally synthesize through a re-modified surface-initiated sol-gel technique. Interestingly, based on the TiO2-PDA@basswood surfaces, great increasement of TC-imprinted sites could be prepared during the sol-gel imprinting process. So it was no surprise that excellent rebinding capacity (150.5 mg g(-1)), fast adsorption kinetics and high permselectivity coefficients (more than 9.0) of 3DW-MIMs could be successfully achieved. Furthermore, an important phenomenon had also been found, i.e. the PDA-modified layers caused significant promotions to the rebinding capacities of the as-prepared 3DWMIMs, that is to say, more and more TC-imprinted sites could be synthesized because of the PDA-modified surfaces. In addition, the as-prepared 3DW-MIMs were synthesized without complicated procedures and polluting the environment. Finally, the experimental results mentioned above, together with the green synthesis processes, strongly demonstrated that our synthesis methodology of 3DW-MIMs had great potential for applications in various fields of selective separation, chemical industry, environment, biological medicine and so on.