High-performance electrocatalytic microfiltration CuO/Carbon membrane by facile dynamic electrodeposition for small-sized organic pollutants removal

Microfiltration exhibits advantage in wastewater treatment because of its higher permeability than ultrafiltration , nanofiltration and reverse osmosis . However, pollutants smaller than the membrane pores are difficult to be separated, resulting in a low removal efficiency. In this work, we fabricate a CuO/carbon membrane for small-sized organic pollutants removal by introducing electrocatalytic oxidation to microfiltration. In order to improve the electrocatalytic performance of membrane, a facile dynamic electrodeposition method is developed, by which CuO electrocatalysts are uniformly deposited on both the surface and pore walls of a coal-based carbon membrane. The prepared dynamic electrodeposited CuO/carbon membrane (DECuO/CM) has superior removal ability over the original carbon membrane (CM) and the conventional electrodeposited CuO/carbon membrane (CECuO/CM). The Rhodamine B (RhB), COD and TOC removal efficiencies of the DECuO/CM reach 99.96%, 71.82% and 64.29%, respectively, which are about 18.7-20.1 and 1.5-1.8 times higher than that of the CM and the CECuO/CM. Meanwhile, DECuO/CM shows higher permeability (823.03 L/(m 2  h bar)) over CM (637.99 L/(m 2  h bar)) and CECuO/CM (706.27 L/(m 2  h bar)). Moreover, DECuO/CM has good sustainability because the RhB removal efficiency maintains above 93% after 5 repeated tests. The extensive applicability of the DECuO/CM is also proved with high removal efficiencies (all above 96%) when treating other three typical small-sized organic pollutants (phenol, bisphenol A and amoxicillin), respectively. Thus, the prepared DECuO/CM shows great potential for small-sized organic pollutants removal with both high permeability and removal efficiency. The dynamic electrodeposition is a promising approach to prepare high-performance electrocatalytic membranes for wastewater treatment.