摘要

Polypropylene is an extensively used membrane material; yet, polypropylene membranes exhibit extremely poor resistance to protein fouling. To ameliorate this issue, graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets were used to modify macroporous polypropylene membrane (MPPM) via layer-by-layer assembly technique through click reaction. First, alkyne-terminated GO was prepared through esterification between carboxyl groups in GO and amide groups in propargylamine; azide-terminated GO was synthesized by the ring-opening reaction of epoxy groups in GO with sodium azide. Second, GO was introduced to the membrane by click chemistry. Characterizations of infrared spectra and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirmed the modification. The sharply decreasing of static water contact angle indicated the improvement of the surface hydrophilicity for GO modified membrane. @@@ Introducing GO to the membrane results in a dramatic increase of water flux, improvements in the antifouling characteristics and antibacterial property for the membranes. The pure water flux through the 5-layered GO modified membrane is 1.82 times that through the unmodified one. The water flux restores to 43.0% for the unmodified membrane while to 79.8% for the modified membrane. The relative flux reduction decreases by 32.1% due to GO modification. The antibacterial property was also enhanced by two-thirds. These results demonstrate that the antifouling and antibacterial characteristics can be raised by tethering GO to the membrane surface.