Crosslinked electrospinning membranes with contamination resistant properties for highly efficient oil-water separation

To achieve the effluent standards or water purification, many water-treatment methods including membrane separation have been applied to separate the oily contaminations and clean water. However, most of the membranes displayed a low separation efficiency or poor reusability due to the functional group loss or their surface adhesion of contaminations including oil and biofoulings. Thus, in this work, a hydrophilic crosslinked PVP membrane was facilely prepared via the electrospinning and crosslinking. Crosslinking solves the problem of loss of hydrophilic components in the separation process, and the cPVP-PAN membrane has high hydrophilicity and excellent pollution resistance. The cPVP-PAN membrane showed a high separation flux (20,610 L m(-2) h(-1) bar(-1)) and an excellent separation efficiency (above 97%) for the oil-water mixtures. At the same time, the membrane has good separation capacities for different oil-water mixtures. Importantly, it shows high separation flux of O/W emulsion (569 L m(-2) h(-1)) only under gravity conditions and a low flux-loss (8.08% after 10-cycle filtration). Furthermore, the membrane could effectively resist the contamination of BSA protein and oil, the flux recovery rates (FRRs) were more than 87.6%. Such membrane shows a broad application prospect in the complex water environmental remediation.

Automated summary

A hydrophilic crosslinked PVP membrane was prepared via electrospinning and crosslinking, showing high separation flux and excellent pollution resistance for oil-water mixtures. It has the potential for broad application in complex water environmental remediation.