Removal of heavy metals and dye from water and wastewater using nanofiltration membranes of polyethersulfone modified with functionalized iron-silica nanoparticles

ABSTRACT

In this study, the performance of polyethersulfone (PES) membranes, fabricated by modifying the iron nano-particles (M-Fe₃O₄), was investigated to remove heavy metals (HM) and Direct red 16 (DR16) dye from water. In this new research work, amine groups were first fixed on nano-particles by modifying iron nano-particles using TEOS and APTES methods. In the next step, M-Fe₃O₄ was used in the structure of membranes, and their effect on surface properties, hydrophilicity (HD), pure water (PW) flux, roughness (Ra), water permeability and removal rate of copper ion (CI) and DR16 dye were investigated. Also, characterization methods such as X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), scanning force microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and antifouling properties have been used to evaluate the synthetic membranes. Thus, the performance of composite membranes showed that the pure water (PW) flux of the membrane M-Fe₃O₄ increased 1.9 times compared to the pure membrane. Moreover, the anti-fouling tests showed that the mixed matrix membranes (MMM) with 0.1 wt% of M-Fe₃O₄ showed the best anti-fouling properties with a 90% recovery rate and 55.98% fouling resistance. On the other hand, results showed that 0.1 wt% composite membrane resulted in the removal of CIs 92% and dye 99%.

KEYWORDS:

• Nanofiltration membrane (NFM)
• Nano-particles
• Heavy metals (HM)
• Direct red 16 (DR16)

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15567036.2023.2219222.