Issue 88, 2015

Free-standing membranes made of activated boron nitride for efficient water cleaning

Abstract

Developing membranes with excellent mechanical strength and chemical stability is a practically important issue for efficient removal of pollutants from wastewater. In this work, we report on a free-standing membrane fabrication from an activated boron nitride (ABN) micro-ribbon. The membrane techniques we used, combine the intrinsic active adsorption competence of ABN and the mechanical advantages of conventional membrane filtration. The obtained membranes show an excellent removal ability of water pollutants through a simple filtration adsorption process. The examined pollutants include toxic metallic ions and organics. We showed that the dye (like methylene blue) removal ability significantly exceeded that of activated carbon by an order of magnitude at least; lead ions (Pb2+) in wastewater can be nearly fully removed, the starting 5 mg L−1 concentration was reduced to less than 0.01 mg L−1 after the 600 μm-thickness membrane adsorption filtration. Moreover, the membranes can be stacked together to further improve the adsorption capacity because of their high permeability. The excellent reusable performance of the filtration membranes was also confirmed. We believe that the reported work should open the way toward the practical application of ABN membranes in the field of wastewater purification.

Graphical abstract: Free-standing membranes made of activated boron nitride for efficient water cleaning

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
20 Jun 2015
Accepted
18 Aug 2015
First published
18 Aug 2015

RSC Adv., 2015,5, 71537-71543

Free-standing membranes made of activated boron nitride for efficient water cleaning

J. Li, H. Jia, J. Lin, H. Luo, Z. Liu, X. Xu, Y. Huang, P. Jin, J. Zhang, S. Abbas and C. Tang, RSC Adv., 2015, 5, 71537 DOI: 10.1039/C5RA11899A

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