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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 90: Poster Session VII: Surface reactions I
O 90.1: Poster
Thursday, March 4, 2021, 10:30–12:30, P
Hierarchically Structured Janus Membrane Surfaces for Enhanced Membrane Distillation Performance — •Nick Chew1,2, Yujun Zhang2, Kunli Goh2, Jia Shin Ho2, Rong Xu2, and Rong Wang2 — 1University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA — 2Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Commercial hydrophobic poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) membranes are vulnerable to membrane fouling and pore wetting, hampering the use of membrane distillation (MD) for the treatment of surfactant- and oil-containing feed streams. To address these challenges, we designed novel Janus membranes with multilevel roughness. Specifically, fouling- and wetting-resistant Janus MD membranes with hierarchically structured surfaces were tailored via oxidant-induced dopamine polymerization followed by in-situ immobilization of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on commercial PVDF hollow fiber substrates. These membranes demonstrated outstanding anti-fouling properties and salt-rejection performances in comparison to membranes with single-level structures. We ascribed their excellent performance to the coupled effects of improved surface hydrophilicity and self-healing mechanism brought about by AgNPs. Furthermore, the newly engineered membranes exhibited antibacterial properties in Bacillus acidicola solutions as evidenced by clear inhibition zones observed on a confocal laser scanning microscope. The development of hierarchically structured Janus MD membranes with multilevel roughness paves a way to mitigating membrane fouling and pore wetting caused by low-surface-tension feed streams in the MD process.