Preparation and properties of TiO₂ blended silk fibroin grafted PAN filtration membrane

Abstract

Using organic solvent in traditional polymer filtration membrane is easy to cause environ-mental pollution.The silk was uniformly grafted with polyacrylonitrile using zinc chloride aqueous sol-ution as the solvent. The nano-TiO2 was blended into the mixture and the casting solution was pre-pared. The TiO2 blended silk fibroin grafted PAN (SF-g-PAN/TiO2) filtration membrane was pre-pared using water as the coagulation bath. The membrane was characterized by scanning electron micr-oscopy and infrared spectroscopy. The hydrophilic, anti-fouling and mechanical properties of SF-g-PAN membranes with different TiO2contents were studied. The rejection performance of dyes with different molecular weight by the SF-g-PAN/TiO2 membrane was investigated. The results show that the mechanical properties of the SF-g-PAN/TiO2 filtration membranes increase firstly and then dec-rease with the increase of TiO2 content. When the content of TiO2 is 1%(mass fraction), the mech-anical and hydrophilic properties of the SF-g-PAN/TiO2 membrane are the best; the rejection of the dyes whose molecular weight is more than 660 is greater than 96%, with the flux of 80 L/(m2·h) at 0.10 MPa.

Keywords

• silk fibroin grafted polyacrylonitrile
• nano tio₂
• anti-fouling
• hydrophilicity
• mechanical property