Filtration of aqueous systems using green-electrospun PVA membranes

S. ESTEVEZ ARECO; S. GOYANES; J. CIMADORO; L. GUZ; L. RIBBA; R. CANDAL

Ciudad de Obregón, Sonora

Simposio; The Sixth International Symposium on Environmental Biotechnology and Engineering; 2018

The availability of clean water is one of the main technological, social andeconomic issues of the 21st century. The removal of suspended particles byfiltration is a critical step on the way to ensuring clean water from natural water sources, as well as to recycling wastewater for reuse. Electrospun nanofibrous membranes are a very attractive and a plausible solution in filtration technology due to their unique properties, including their high porosity (typically around 80%), controllable pore size distribution, high permeability and fully interconnected pore network. Depending on the pore size of the membrane, different type of impurities can be removed from the aqueous solution. Due to the size exclusion of the pollution, as the pore size decreases, the rejection ratio increases. In this work, PVA membranes crosslinked with citric acid were developed in a green and scalable process by electrospinning. The obtained membranes, with initial pores of the order of microns or more, can, after a short swelling transitory time, retain particles of nanometric size. The morphology of the mesh varies as a function of time in contact with water, as observed by AFM. The filtration performance of the mesh was characterized using water and TiO2 nanoparticle suspensions, showing an increase in the rejection rate over time, which exceeds 99% after a post-transitional period.