Thin-Film Composite Polyamide Nanofiltration Membrane With Silver Combined Polymeric Nanoparticles Interlayer for Enhanced Antibacterial/Antifouling Performance

Nanofiltration (NF) technology is an important technique for addressing the global water crisis, but the bacterial fouling in long-term running reduces the lifetime and limits the application of NF membranes. To solve this problem, a kind of sandwich-shaped thin-film composite (TFC) polyamide (PA) membranes with silver combined polymeric nanoparticles (PNs/Ag) as interlayer was fabricated in this work. Analysis via energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) confirmed the successful formation of a silver layer through in situ reduction, which was observed to uniformly encapsulate the polymeric nanoparticle surfaces. The prepared NF membranes had a pure water flux of 71.0 L m −2 h −1 and Na 2 SO 4 rejection of 96.7% at 5.0 bar. The application prospect of NF membranes was proved by a series of testing under different operation conditions. The successful introduction of PNs/Ag enhanced the antibacterial performance of the NF membrane against E. coli and S. aureus in static bacteria adhesion test. This work proposes a feasible strategy for the construction of NF membranes with antibacterial property.