Natural product flavonoid of naringenin based thin-film composite polyester membranes preparation for antibiotic separation

The application of membrane separation technology in wastewater treatment and pharmaceutical purification has attracted considerable attention. The development of a membrane with effective separation performance and antibacterial properties is of considerable interest for the separation and purification of antibiotics. Here, a thin-film composite (TFC) polyester membrane with effective antibiotic removal and antibacterial properties was fabricated via a facile one-step interfacial polymerization (IP) strategy. Naringenin (Nar), a natural product of flavonoid material derived from the pericarp, was utilized as the aqueous monomer. The suitable reactivity of Nar afforded the resulting membrane with a highly negative charged surface. The rejection performances for the antibiotics cephalothin, cefuroxime sodium, ceftriaxone sodium, and cefoperazone sodium were 96.3 %, 97.7 %, 99.2 %, and 99.8 %, respectively. The pure water permeance was 7.5 L m −2 h −1 bar −1 at a transmembrane pressure of 5 bar. The antibacterial efficacy was greater than 99.0 % against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus , attributable to the flavonoid structure of Nar. The present work proposed a feasible strategy to prepare TFC membranes with high nanofiltration performance and intrinsic antibacterial efficacy.