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

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia (2020LH02005) and the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia University of Technology (ZZ201905).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Chemical Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, 010051, People’s Republic of China

    Haitao Meng, Haiou Liang, Tong Xu, Jie Bai & Chunping Li

  2. Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Industrial Catalysis, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, 010051, People’s Republic of China

    Haitao Meng, Haiou Liang, Tong Xu, Jie Bai & Chunping Li

  3. Department of Energy and Chemical Engineering, Xinjiang Institute of Technology, Aksu, 843100, People’s Republic of China

    Haitao Meng

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  1. Haitao Meng
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Correspondence to Tong Xu.

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Meng, H., Liang, H., Xu, T. et al. Crosslinked electrospinning membranes with contamination resistant properties for highly efficient oil–water separation. J Polym Res 28, 347 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10965-021-02700-0

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