110th anniversary: Polyamide/metal–organic framework bilayered thin film composite membranes for the removal of pharmaceutical compounds from water

Abstract

Nanofiltration can be a useful tool to remove pharmaceuticals in water sources. The performance of the most used thin film composite (TFC) membranes, typically with a thin polyamide (PA) layer, can be improved using thin film nanocomposite (TFN) membranes obtained by the introduction of a filler within the PA layer. In this work, to control the positioning of the filler two kinds of PA/metal–organic framework (MOF) bilayered TFC (BTFC) membranes, PA/ZIF-93 and PA/HKUST-1, were synthesized onto polyimide supports. First, the interfacial synthesis was used for the preparation of a MOF layer, and second, a PA layer was synthesized by interfacial polymerization. These BTFC membranes were applied in the nanofiltration of diclofenac and naproxen aqueous solutions obtaining a maximum water permeance of 33.1 and 24.9 L·m–2·h–1·bar–1, respectively, with a rejection of ≥98% when HKUST-1 was used. These permeance improvements (using diclofenac, 4.9 and 3.4 times the value of the TFC and TFN membranes, respectively) ...