Filtration of aqueous systems using green-electrospun PVA membranes

LAURA RIBBA; ROBERTO CANDAL; SANTIAGO ESTÉVEZ-ARECO; SILVIA GOYANES; JONATHAN CIMADORO; LUCAS GUZ

Sonoroa

Congreso; 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 watersources, as well as to recycling wastewater for reuse. Electrospun nanofibrousmembranes are a very attractive and a plausible solution in filtration technologydue to their unique properties, including their high porosity (typically around 80%),controllable pore size distribution, high permeability and fully interconnected porenetwork. Depending on the pore size of the membrane, different type of impuritiescan be removed from the aqueous solution. Due to the size exclusion of thepollution, as the pore size decreases, the rejection ratio increases.In this work, PVA membranes crosslinked with citric acid were developed in agreen and scalable process by electrospinning. The obtained membranes, withinitial pores of the order of microns or more, can, after a short swelling transitorytime, retain particles of nanometric size. The morphology of the mesh varies as afunction of time in contact with water, as observed by AFM. The filtrationperformance of the mesh was characterized using water and TiO2 nanoparticlesuspensions, showing an increase in the rejection rate over time, which exceeds99% after a post-transitional period.