Engineering a Robust, Versatile Amphiphilic Membrane Surface Through Forced Surface Segregation for Ultralow Flux‐Decline

Abstract

Unlike biofoulants/pollutants, oil foulants/pollutants are prone to coalesce, spread and migrate to form continuous fouling layer covering on the surfaces. Therefore, such kind of fouling can not be simply alleviated by hydrophilic modification with currently extensively used antifouling materials such as poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)‐based or zwitterionic polymers etc. In the present study, an amphiphilic porous membrane surface, comprising hydrophilic fouling resistant domains and hydrophobic fouling release microdomains, is explored via a "forced surface segregation" approach. The resultant membranes exhibit both superior oil‐fouling and bio‐fouling resistant property: membrane fouling is exquisitely suppressed and the permeation flux‐decline is decreased to an ultralow level. It can be envisaged that the present study may open a novel avenue to the design and construction of robust, versatile antifouling surfaces.

Recent progress in developing advanced membranes for emulsified oil/water separation

“…Among these copolymers, ternary copolymers containing a hydrophobic 'anchoring' segment, hydrophilic fouling resistance segment or nonpolar hydrophobic segment with low surface free energy have received much attention because of their excellent complicated structure. [52][53][54] During the phase inversion process, dragged by the hydrophilic segments, the non-polar hydrophobic segment tends to migrate to the membrane surface to form micro-domains. These micro-domains are advantageous to antifouling performance because of their low surface free energy.…”

“…The operation process includes three steps: pure water filtration (1), oil/water emulsion filtration (2), 20 min of water washing (not shown) and the second-round pure water filtration (3). (Reproduced from Chen et al 52 with permission from the American Chemical Society. )…”

Preparation of Antifouling Nanofiltration Membrane via Interfacial Polymerization of Fluorinated Polyamine and Trimesoyl Chloride

“…In the antifouling property evaluation experiments, BSA, HA and oil were used as simulated To elucidate the antifouling property in details, flux recovery ratio (FRR), total flux decline ratio (DR t ), reversible flux decline ratio (DR r ) and irreversible flux decline ratio (DR ir ) were used as indexes, 35 which were defined as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60…”

“…For instance, PIP-terminated PEG (PIP-PEG-PIP), zwitterionic amine monomer (AEPPS) and polyhexamethylene guanidine hydrochloride (PHGH) with antibacterial property have been used as amine monomer to react with trimesoyl chloride (TMC) for preparing antifouling TFC NF membranes by interfacial polymerization . 4,31,32 Recently, materials containing perfluoroalkyl groups have also been widely employed in antifouling field, such as marine coating, 33 ultrafiltration membrane [34][35][36][37][38] and NF membrane, 39,40 etc.…”

Optimized permeation and antifouling of PVDF hybrid ultrafiltration membranes: synergistic effect of dispersion and migration for fluorinated graphene oxide

“…Improving the dispersion of nanomaterials was conducive to membrane properties, but majority of nanomaterials embedded in the membrane matrix and the properties of nanomaterials could not be truly exploited. In order to improve the nanomaterial content in the surface of membranes, migration behavior was an interesting and low-energy consumption process, which were reported by Jiang group (Chen et al 2011;Liu et al 2015b;Zhao et al 2014) and other research groups (Asatekin et al 2007;Hashim et al 2009;Zhao et al 2013b;Zhu et al 2014b). María Arsuaga et al (2013) explored the effect of the metal oxide nanoparticle aggregation.…”