Preparation of Cu-CNT/ceramic Hollow Fiber Membranes and Investigation of their Antibiofouling Performance under Electrochemical Assistance

Abstract

Loading releasable biocide is a conventional method to mitigate membrane biofouling, but its application is always limited by short lifetime as a result of biocide releasing. In this study, an anti-biofouling membrane was fabricated by introducing copper nanoparticle/carbon nanotubes on ceramic substrate. Meanwhile, electrochemical assistance was applied to improve the membrane performance in filtering bacterial suspension. The flux of electrically assisted membrane was 2.6 times as high as that without electropolarization. Meanwhile, the dissolution rate of copper ions can be decreased by 55% with the assistance of applied voltage in comparison with membrane separation alone.