A review on electrospun bio-based polymers for water treatment

Abstract

Abstract. Over the past decades, electrospinning of biopolymers down to nanoscale garnered much interest to address most of the millennia issues related to water treatment. The fabrication of these nanostructured membranes added a new dimension to the current nanotechnologies where a wide range of materials can be processed to their nanosize. Electrospinning is a simple and versatile technique to fabricate unique nanostructured membranes with fascinating properties for a wide spectrum of applications such as filtration and others. These nanostructured membranes, fabricated by electrospinning, were found to be of a paramount importance because of their advanced inherited properties such as large surface-to-volume ratio, as well as tuneable porosity, stability, and high permeability. The extensive research conducted on these materials extended the success of electrospinning not only to bio-based polymer nanofibres, but to their hybrids and their derivatives. The technique also created avenues for advanced and massive production of nanofibres. This paper reviews the recent developments in the electrospinning technique. Electrospinning of biopolymers, their blends and functionalization using metals/metal oxides, and the potential applications of electrospun nanofibrous membranes in water filtration are discussed.

Preparation of Pure and Stable Chitosan Nanofibers by Electrospinning in the Presence of Poly(ethylene oxide)

“…The advantage of the nanofibrous filter media is their high surface area per unit of mass and strong mechanical strength [14]. A wide range of methods has been used to produce chitosan-based nanofibrous materials, typically electrospinning which has received a lot of attention in several scientific studies [1,15]. Electrospinning of chitosan has been improved, optimizing the affecting factors such as the solution properties (viscosity, surface tension and conductivity) [16,17,18], processing parameters and ambient conditions [16,19,20,21,22].…”

“…With respect to the applications of these chitosan materials obtained by electrospinning, it must be pointed out that they are important for cell cultures [5,37], tissue engineering [6], and also for ion adsorption [14,39,41] or water treatment [15]. It is also necessary to mention that not only electrospun chitin and chitosan are produced but also chitin derivatives [24,45,46].…”

Novel electrospun polyvinylidene fluoride-graphene oxide-silver nanocomposite membranes with protein and bacterial antifouling characteristics

“…Electrospinning is a versatile process to produce polymer fibers with diameters ranging from several nanometers to micrometers under the application of an electric field. When the applied field overcomes the surface tension of polymer solution, a charged fluid stream is ejected from the tip of syringe onto a target collector [28][29][30][31][32]. Electrospun polymer membranes generally exhibit high porosity with interconnected open pores, and high surface area to volume ratio.…”

Preparation of thin film nanofibrous composite NF membrane based on EDC/NHS modified PAN-AA nanofibrous substrate

“…TFNC membranes have been proven to be an effective media for nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO), which structure with a thin and dense functional barrier layer supported on a reinforced porous substrate [1][2][3][4]. The ultra-thin dense barrier layer is usually obtained through interfacial polymerization (IFP), by which the filtration performance of TFNC membranes is mainly determined.…”